Blogs, Views, and BluesBlog reviews, technology, thoughts, and blues music hosted by Rich Palmer

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Blogs

iPhone users have the ability to voice blog right from their phones with the app called “Audioboo.”

With Audioboo they can share and record their audio with the world. According to the iTunes App Store description:

A built in recorder allows you to create audio up to 3 minutes in length and post that to your own account on the web. You can add titles, text, geolocation info and a photo to the recording before you upload it and we’ll save that with the file.

The web site allows “followers” to subscribe to the posts of their favorite Audioboo members through iTunes or RSS. Rich shared audio examples from:
David Bailey – DBFMBE
Len Edgerly

Pick up the application in the iTunes App Store.
(Note: Following this recording Rich discovered that it may be possible to use Audioboo with an iPod Touch while using an attached set of Apple in-ear headphones with mic.)

Views

Rich recommends that people interested in starting their own podcast — or those looking to improve one that they may already produce — should listen to Dave Jackson’s “School of Podcasting” and his newest show called “Power of Podcasting.” A members-only option is also available at the SOP.

Blues

Mojo Buford
“Ghetto Blaster” (mp3)
from “Harpslinger”
(Cold Wind Records, Inc.)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Rhapsody
Buy at Napster
Stream from Rhapsody
More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.

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Blogs AND Views

Do you want to set aside the typewriter and be able to blog simply by making a phone call? You can “phlog” easily with a service called iPadio.

Rich shares some uses and his thoughts on this three-month-old service from the UK. Visit Rich on iPadio.

From their web site:

ipadio allows you to broadcast from any phone to the Internet live. Phone blog, collect audio data, record and update the world, or simply let your mates know what you’re doing – ipadio is integrated with Social Media & Blogging platforms. (pat pend GB0820862.1)

Blues

Dave Hole
“Phone Line” (mp3)
from “Ticket To Chicago”
(Alligator Records)

Buy at Amazon
Buy at iTunes
Buy at Alligator
Buy at mTraks
More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.

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Blogs AND Views

Wish you could simply email anything you wanted to an address and have it post correctly in your own blog? Posterous claims to be the “dead simple way to post everything online using email.” They say, “You can attach any kind of file and we’ll always do the right thing.”

Some of the key features include:

• Post a series of photos in one message and it becomes an image gallery
• Post a video file and it becomes embedded into a player and a download link right in your post
• Post an audio file and it gets its own player and a download link
• An RSS feed that can also be used to push your files out via a podcast or subscription feed
• Cross-posting or auto-posting to many other social sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and more.
• Import existing blogs to the Posterous account

Another key feature that Rich likes: You can email your file to a service name, such as Twitter with the posterous address and it will end up on Twitter, as well… or any other of the recognized sites that you set up for posting. So, twitter at yourname.posterous.com will send it to Twitter, as well as post it to the Posterous site. If you want it to go to Twitter AND Facebook, send it to twitter+facebook at yourname.posterous.com. It will send to both.

If you like other’s Posterous sites, you can subscribe to them. Then subscribe to your “My Subscriptions” feed and it will go directly to your reader or even email address with the contents of each of your favorite publishers.

There are many other features, visit Posterous.com to find out about the service.

Blues

Big James and the Chicago Playboys
“A Little Attention” (mp3)
from “Right Here Right Now”
(Blind Pig Records)

More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Blogs

Do you want to blog, but really don’t want to write? Do you have a story to tell, but don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it?

Rich reviews the video micro-blogging service called 12seconds.tv on this episode of Blogs, Views and Blues. You can find him there as richpalmer.

richpalmer on 12seconds.tv

Views

Rich is impressed how the band Collective Soul is using social media to keep fans up-to-date on their new album, the recordings, the tour and more. They are even holding contests. Rich wonders what others are doing to promote their projects or themselves. Is video a good option? What are you doing? Email or call in your comments.

Blues

Koko Taylor
“Stop Watching Your Enemies” (mp3)
from “Jump For Joy”
(Alligator Records)

Buy at Amazon
More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Blogs

In episode 34 Rich showed you how to embed video from services such as Viddler, YouTube and Vimeo with the Video Embedder plugin.

Perhaps you would like to have personal branded flash player on your site. Or maybe you would like to be able to serve videos from your own server or hosting account without the third-party brands.

The Flash Video Player plugin for Wordpress may be the answer. With this plugin you can host your flash encoded videos on a server of your choice, alter a few options to better match the player to your site, or even designate specific default values in the WP dashboard. You can even add your own logo or watermark to the player. The player has a full options menu for customization that includes:

• Custom Skin Support
• Full Plugin Support
• Custom Player Colors
• Custom Watermark Logo
• Poster Frames
• Floating Controls

When you install this plugin, you’ll want to know this very valuable embed tag for placing the video in your post on the page you want to display:
[flashvideo file=videos/my-video.flv /]

An entire list of options/customization can be found at the mac-dev.net web site.

Here are two examples. The first is a flash file hosted on Rich’s server:

The second is a file hosted at YouTube. You can see that it will deliver both types of files in the same way.

Views

Rich thinks more people should check out Delivr. This site lets you share web site URLs with other users that may browse sites more often from their mobile phones. Delivr lets you share these with most of the popular social sites, as well as send it directly to a phone number.

The best part of the site is that it creates a .pdf flyer that you can post or distribute to share the site. The flyer includes an image of the web site to be shared, the main URL, the delivr URL and — most importantly — a scan code image of the site URL. People that come across the flyer on a bulletin board, countertop or elsewhere can use their scan code software and camera on their phone to directly access the web site.

Rich’s profile at Delivr is richpalmer.delivr.com.

Blues

Damon Fowler
“Sugar Shack” (mp3)
from “Sugar Shack”
(Blind Pig Records)

More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sponsor: Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days! www.gotomypc.com/podcast

Blogs and Views

There are two options that you might want to use to shorten a URL while maintaining your site brand. You can also use track visitor/user activity more easily than with services such as TinyURL.com and Bit.ly.

Shorty – This is installed in a subfolder of your primary domain. You update a configuration file with your database information. It includes a secure control panel and gives you three ways shorten the target URL.

GoCodes – This is a plugin for WordPress. It is installed into your plugin directory and controlled by a small control panel found in your Tools menu (if you are using the latest version of WP).

Both services shorten lengthy URLs and help you maintain brand. However, if you have a long domain name (such as BlogsViewsandBlues.com) it won’t save you much real estate on services such as Twitter and Facebook. It will, however maintain your brand. If you are only sharing links for others to visit sites such as YouTube, MySpace and such then it might be best to stick with the third-party services.

Blues

Buckwheat Zydeco
“Ninth Place” (mp3)
from “Lay Your Burden Down”
(Alligator Records)

More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sponsor: Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days! www.gotomypc.com/podcast

Blogs

There is a simple little plugin for Wordpress called “Video Embedder.”
The author’s site states:

[Video Embedder] makes it easy to embed movies from various sources, such as YouTube and Google Video. The benefit with this plugin is that you don’t have to paste some strange video embed code into your Wordpress post, all you need is the ID of the video. As a bonus none of the videos embedded with Video Embedder will break your precious validated Wordpress based site, all of the movies will show up nice and clean.

Another advantage is that you can manage the settings for all of your embedded movies from the Wordpress settings for Video Embedder, the properties for all the movies will be updated instantly as soon as you save the settings.

Get it here.

Example from Plugin

Views

Mashable recently reported that Microsoft Vine is in beta. It will be interesting to see if this impacts Twitter and/or Facebook users at all.

Blues

Saffire–The Uppity Blues Women
“Going Down to the River” (mp3)
from “Havin’ the Last Word”
(Alligator Records)

More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sponsor: Access Your PC from Anywhere with GoToMyPC. Try it FREE for 30 days! www.gotomypc.com/podcast

Blogs

If you are using screencasts to share content, tutorials, or tours of your blog or web site you might enjoy the service provided by ScreenCastle.com. This site presents an easy to use interface with a single record button. The software requires Java. Click here for a free download if you don’t already have it.

Rich discovered this site from a post at MakeUseOf.com.

Views

Rich is excited to have won a free single-user license for the Wordpress theme WPUnlimited by David Peralty. Rich followed the instructions at JimKukral.com to win this theme.

If you would like explore more about the theme, visit the WPUnlimited Demo Page.

Blues

Nathaniel Street West
“Motorpsycho Nightmare” (mp3)
from “Light Out For The Territory”
(Puffin Records)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at eMusic
Buy at Rhapsody
Buy at Napster
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Amazon MP3
More On This Album

The theme music for Blogs, Views, and Blues was created by Chainsaw Dupont. The tune is called “Funky Foot”. Find his music at ChainsawDupont.com and at the Podsafe Music Network. Original guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.

Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.