Archive for June, 2006

Creating and Publishing Audio Content Online

Monday, June 12th, 2006

Tomorrow I begin attending a 3-day workshop Podcasting: Creating and Publishing Audio Content Online. Doing some research in anticipation of the seminar, I discovered some tasty tidbits to get the juices flowing.

The book Podcasting Solutions: The Complete Guide to Podcasting was written by two experienced podcasters, Michael Geoghegan and Dan Klass, and contains practical tips and insider know-how. Some of the authors’ recommended hardware is available from BSW Professional Audio Gear.

The site How to Podcast is self-decribed as: the definitive step-by-step guide on how to podcast (including getting started, marketing, improving audio quality,
making money, and more). This is the home of the that will take your podcast from concept to launch fast and for minimal cost.
The same site includes an Audacity Tutorial for Podcasters.

I am interested in interviewing others and in being interviewed. For Mac users, the 2006 version of in iLife, Garageband 3, has expanded to make podcasting a snap, especially in combination with a .Mac Web site. Apple refers to it as a podcasting authoring studio, complete with royalty-free sound effects, jingles, and the use of iChat for conducting remote interviews.

If you want to include content from speakers in other locations, as in an interview, Virtual Audio Cable for the PC and Audio Hijack Pro for the Mac are able to capture sound from
Skype conversations.

Develop a regular audience and you have the potential to earn money via advertising. Fruitcast downloads your MP3 audio file, adds the advertisements, on the fly, to the beginning or end of your program, and then sends your podcast to your subscribers. You are paid each time a podcast episode is downloaded.

Then there is PodPress, multi-featured plug-in for podcasters using WordPress. Upcoming I’ll have more on the subject of .

Ask Search Blogs – Best for Now

Friday, June 9th, 2006

Ask Search Blogs is cool.

Ask owns Bloglines, my primary . Bloglines is currently indexing over 1.5 billion archived posts – searching for what people subscribe to. So instead of using net crawlers to discover links, the Bloglines subscriber indexing efforts should eventually generate more useful results than other blog/feed search sites.

The results page allows you to subscribe to the feed or post to sites like digg and del.icio.us.

[tags]search engines[/tags]

Accessibility Color Wheel – Color Blindness

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

The accessibility color wheel is an online tool used to chose a color pair with good contrast and visibility. It simulates the vision of . Web designers who need good colors for text and background of their will find the accessibility color wheel useful.

The Motive Web Design Glossary – Great Detail!

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

New Zealand web firm provides enough detail to be truly useful, with proper explanations that really describe the meaning.
The Motive Web Design Glossary

above-the-fold

The portion of a webpage visible in the browser window when the page first loads is decribed as being ‘above-the-fold’. The phrase is a reference to the area of a newspaper visible when folded for display in a news stand, typically containing the masthead and lead story.

A more appropriate (medium-appropriate) equivalent being “before-the-scroll”.

The concept of a fold was seen as key in the early days of the web, based on the belief that only content placed in this area of the page—usually the first 300 vertical pixels—could be guaranteed “eyeballs”. Over time, users have become more accustomed to scrolling, however the first fold continues to be highly sought-after by advertisers.

Cheap Blog Hosting

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Even if you’re going to use a free service like Blogger, you’ll want to host the blog/site on your own service. Trust me, it will save you from hassle later on! A good place to get is Hosting Zoom 6 sites for only $5/month (if you’re not technical), or Reseller Zoom 50 sites for $5/month (for the geeks) .

Domains for FREE!

Monday, June 5th, 2006

Get your own domain. Use a good registrar like 1&1 which offers .com domains for only $5.99 a year – basically that’s only 50 cents a month! And that price includes domain privacy, so that no one can see who owns the domain.

Plus they have a deal where you can get 5 FREE .info domains – just be sure to register using their “Instant Domain” package. (You don’t even have to buy a .com domain to take advantage of the .info deal.)

100,000 Daily Pageviews for AdSense API

Thursday, June 1st, 2006

Google announces AdSense API for developers.

The AdSense API is a free beta service that allows you to integrate AdSense into your website offerings. You can use the API to let your users create an AdSense account, make changes to an existing account without leaving your site, or more — visit the AdSense API site for details. If you own a site in which you register users who manage web content, and your site has more than 100,000 daily pageviews, you may qualify for participation in the AdSense API (BETA). If you’d like to participate, simply fill out the application below.