Posting Podcasts and Pictures

Now that I've posted the art pictures and podcast, I can reflect on the experience of doing so.

Posting pictures is frustrating. Some of them post in a strange orientation...vertical, when they should be horizontal, for instance. I can't figure out how to rotate them, although it must be possible...other Blogger blogs I've read seem to have all of the pictures looking good. I also don't seem to have a lot of control over the layout of the pictures in the post, plus, they seem to post bottom up. Now that I know that, I can adjust how I add them in the future, but it makes me wonder why a bottom up post would be the default...unless it's because blogs are read from bottom up. (This is a little strange to me, too. Nice, I guess, when you're reading them, because you know the most recent will be at the top. But, why not go the other way with the most recent at the bottom...and just have your aggregators point you to the bottom of the blog? The programming technology must not allow that.) Anyway, it is cool to be able to have a central location to post pictures and comments/backstory about those pictures all in one location for efficient sharing.

Posting the podcasts took some additional learning on my part. I'd hoped that I'd be able to post the cast directly on this blog, but that doesn't seem to be an option with Blogger, like it may be with other hosts. I tried a Google Gadget called Podsharing, or something like that, but couldn't get it to work...in fact, it caused my blog to hangup in mid-post. In the end, I had to go back to my handy dandy Podcasting in School book, and learned that there are a number of websites that will store one's podcasts for free. I tried out the first one on the list, switchpod, and got going on it easily, uploading all the files I wanted to within a few minutes. Then, it was just a matter of posting a link to my "podcast" (which I think of as an individual file; switchpod seems to think of it as a group of any number of files with the same theme) on switchpod. Cool.

Creating the podcast itself is amazingly easy. Once I learned that I needed to use two public-source programs called Audacity and LAME to edit (Audacity) and convert to .mp3 format (LAME), it was a piece of cake. Audacity makes audio editing as easy as editing a word processing document, allowing you to "cut" or "cut and paste" audio tracks. After the file is edited as desired, LAME is a one button click within Audacity to export to mp3 format. Couldn't be easier.