serviceindustrynight.net

No podcast this weekend. Freak’s gone and hit the big 30 and somehow it didn’t seem right for us to sit in the midst of his extended family and discuss the higher points of midget donkey porn. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain segment of his crew that would be down but his mom isn’t really one of them.

Also there’s some technical stuff going on behind the scenes, so if things appear broken be patient. If you notice that things stay broken, drop me a line because I probably missed something.

Mrono (dude, you are so going to have to send me an audio clip or something so I know how you pronounce that? mmrowno? mister ohno?) asked me why the insistence on Gizmo for our call-in/voicemail that doesn’t get get used anyway. It’s a valid question.

The reason we don’t use Skype is that, for the longest time, Skype Mac simply didn’t have feature parity with Skype PC. That, plus that Gizmo is based on an open standard (SIP) versus Skype’s proprietary protocol. And finally, when I last looked, Gizmo just had features that Skype didn’t, like voicemail. I understand Skype has grown quite a bit so I’ll give it another look.

The last pre-recorded podcast has been (heavily) edited and is ready for posting, pending approval from my co-hosts. Turns out that it got really hard to even remember what we talked about, so I figured it might be good to revisit before we release it into the wild.

Some changes should be immediately obvious. On the right you’ll now see that you can email us individually now, so fire away. I’ve also added a Gizmo account for the podcast so you can leave us comments (for free!). If you haven’t heard about Gizmo you should look into it. It’s similar to Skype but comes with a few more features. Oh, and it isn’t eBay’s bitch.

I’ve got some ideas for del.icio.us integration that should start to gel over the next few days, and we have a plan to get the cast together this week to solidify our future plans. Lots of interesting and exciting stuff in the pipe folks, just hang in there for now.

I just found out a couple of things. First and foremost, our podcast hosting solution is a little complex. Secondly, Feedburner breaks if your XML has Unicode character 0×1d in there (which we non-geeks recognize as a tab). Thirdly, Slapcast is perfectly okay with a body using tabs in their show notes. Generally I frown on software and service providers who feel the need to protect a user from themselves, so I’m not exactly holding Slapcast responsible, but a friendly warning would have been nice. Nicer would be the ability for me to upload my own .xml file rather than have to use the auto-generated one that Slapcast creates. I’ve spoken with the gentleman who runs Slapcast a couple of times and Roger’s a cool dude so I have faith that someday they might make such a thing possible. It’s not a killer, but it would be cool to have.

Here’s the most important thing I just found out: when it comes to podcasts, iTunes is retarded. It pains me to say this (though I have said it before and this is why I don’t use iTunes for podcast management) because iTunes, when it comes to bringing us subscribers, has been berry berry good to us. About 70% of you nice folks come by way of iTunes. Just for shits and giggles I decided to check our listing on the iTMS, just to make sure that everything was copacetic and found, to my dismay, that the latest show was not there. Now the iTMS is not known for updating rapidly so I did some investigating. This uncovered the problems with Slapcast and Feedburner (problems of my own creation, I take full responsibility for being ignorant) which I promptly fixed.

iTunes still doesn’t work. Click the subscribe button on our page in iTunes and, sure enough, iTunes will subscribe you to Service Industry Night. It just won’t download anything. A little warning icon appears next to our title and, when you click on that, you get the wonderfully helpful message that “The URL does not appear valid.” Great.

Here’s how you make it work:

1. In iTunes, under the “Advanced” menu, select “Subscribe to Podcast…”
2. In the window that pops up, enter: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ServiceIndustryNight
3. Enjoy.

Mind you, this is EXACTLY the same URL that appears in the information window if you try to subscribe to Service Industry Night through the iTMS and end up with the aforementioned broken subscription, so I have no idea what’s going on here, unless iTunes is doing some sneaky redirects or something.

So if you’re subscribed in iTunes and you’re not getting the podcast, try deleting your subscription and re-subscribing manually like I described above. I’ve tried it and, for whatever reason it works. NetNewsWire doesn’t exhibit this behavior, so if I hadn’t have checked I wouldn’t have known.

In the interest of organization, I’ve added a new category for all the hot and dirty technical details, since I know you’re all just a bunch of sluts for things like how to edit your .htaccess file so you can redirect an XML request without your subscribers seeing it. Yeah, I don’t really know what that means either.

From now on, once technical stuff expires off the main page you can find it all lumped together in the “Technical Crap” category. You dirty nerds.

I hit a post on Slashdot a little bit ago that mentioned the phenomenon of “skypecasting,” which sort of suggested that this was the natural evolution of podcasting. The implication was that you could use Skype to distribute podcasts for free (Skype, being a voip program with p2p underpinnings, would seem like a natural for this) with no bandwidth concerns. Okay, that sound pretty cool. So I start looking around on the net for more info. The Unbound Spiral link gets a 404. Swell. The Moodle link (if you read the Slashdot post, you know what I’m talking about here) requires a registration. Even better.

So, off to Google. On Google, I find this, supposedly the definitive guide to skypecasting. In a nutshell, it’s a description about how to use Skype, plus Windows Sound Recorder plus something called Virtual Audio Cable (which sounds like a weak tea version of Audio Hijack) to record a Skype interview. There’s also hype about how you could potentially use this to turn an MP3 player into a Skype based radio station. This article has the interesting quote: “the level amount (sic) of required technical know-how makes it not for ‘mere mortals.’”

Well gee. To quote a film favorite of mine: “Let’s not start sucking each other dicks just yet gentlemen.”

First of all, unless I am gravely mistaken, we’re talking about recording a Skype call and that’s all. Audio Hijack Pro can do this right now (and, if you’ve read the pdf, you should agree with me that using AHP is orders of magnitude more simple). The pdf file I linked above mentions the seeming impossibility of mixing music into the interview with VAC, which is not a problem with AHP. Not to rain on your parade guys, I’m just saying. And, so far as I can tell, the “turn an MP3 player into a radio station” meme looks like nothing more than routing the output of your MP3 player to Skype so that people can listen to it just like they were listening to a phone call. Again, AHP ought to be able to do that without any trouble, but, really, why would you want to? If you want to stream audio, why not look at an audio streaming app? Unless you’ve got some way to allow someone to remotely trigger a file transfer with Skype (I don’t use Skype much, so I don’t know if this is possible) aren’t they just limited to listening passively to whatever you feed them? Maybe they could record it, but they still have to play it out in real time to do so. Sounds kind of like taping something off the radio to me. Feasible, but a rather significant step backward from the inherent time-shifting of podcasting.

I intend to keep my eye on this skypecasting thing. I think the idea of using Skype for distribution is interesting, but no more or less worthy than using Bittorrent. Both ideas solve the bandwidth issue, but each has some significant technical hurdles. For the time being, I’ll stick with paying for a low cost, zero bandwidth solution like Slapcast. Still, if you don’t have a Mac with OS X and you’re looking for what looks to be a very painful Windows podcasting solution, you might want to check this out. For my money, if you’re using Windows, I would look at iPodcast Producer first.

Disclaimer: I originally posted this on my personal blog: Oceanside, Nevada