FYI: MS info

for Holly, who recently found out that a dear old friend has MS:

The life expectancy of people with MS is now nearly the same as that of unaffected people.

The earlier in life MS occurs, the slower disability progresses... Those diagnosed before age 35 have the best prognosis. Females generally have a better prognosis than males.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sclerosis

audio

here's a link to download my song "Ten Silver Needles" - this post is also my first podcast (this one's just the one song). more to come when i get a proper show together.

podcasting 101

i was confused at first by all the information that's out there. When i first started looking into podcasting around this time last year, there was too few articles with too much information. i present to you the Simple Version.

So you wanna podcast?

Ok, here's whatcha wanna do:

1. Record yer audio & make it all nice and friendly with Audacity. For the most listenable results, export as an mp3 file, perhaps 128kbps/joint stereo/16bit/44.1kHz (kbps can change to taste, but you want to keep your file slim without being warbly or over-compressed - never use joint stereo for quality audio, only for speech, to cut a few kb off; in fact, you can easily get away with mono for speech). Never forget to edit your MP3's ID3 tag, to make it more informative and give yourself credit.
2. Host it. i use www.ourmedia.org for free media storage & bandwidth ("forever"). for some reason it requires registering with www.archive.org first, which is pretty cool anyway. don't be fooled, your username at first will actually be your email address.
3. Get your feed URL happening. sign up for Blogger or some other blogging site (i just use good old www.LiveJournal.com) for a feed generator and general blog to link to your audio.
4. Make it podcast-friendly. i use www.feedburner.com to convert the RSS or Atom feeds into an RSS 2.0 feed that automatically detects any links to media (be it audio, video, or image files) and wraps it with the tag, the key to the whole thing.
5. Blog. it's as easy as typing in
   <a href="http://www.archive.org/download/File_Name/01FileName.mp3">new Podcast is online now</a>
   and hitting "update".
6. Phone up Ira Glass of PRI's This American Life. Tell him his days are numbered. Hang up suddenly and with a certain gusto, for effect. This last bit is purely optional. Nevertheless, you should tell people about it, just so you're not wasting your time. My feed is at
   http://feeds.feedburner.com/Transmothra-SignsOfTheCollapse

So you want to listen now, eh?

1. Download a podcast-enabled free RSS news aggregator (you can find one almost anywhere, just google it or follow the links provided herein). Don't want to deal with that? Grab a decent browser already! Some browsers have built-io RSS functionality, while others require add-ons. Firefox has a great extension called Wizz RSS that makes it oh so easy.
2. Add the RSS link of your choice to your aggregator. Sites with RSS will have a little "RSS" or "XML" logo. Copy the link.
3. Follow the instructions for your aggregator to listen to podcasts. in my case, i just open up the RSS reader, click on the channel, click on the post, and select "enclosure".
4. For more info, see podCast411.

read through the links provided, and you'll get the picture quickly and pretty easily.