I haven’t got round to doing a podcast for a while. I’ve been using up the remainder of my holidays recently, having lots of long weekends, which should have given me plenty of time to do one, but instead I’ve been doing … well, hang on a minute, what have I been doing?
That’s sort of a general feeling I have most of the time: feels like I’m very busy, but also feels like I’m not getting very much done. Anyway, one thing I did get done (a few weeks back now) was a recording for The Writing Show podcast.
They’ve called it “All About Tech Writing”. I don’t think it quite lives up to that billing, but if you’re interested in having a listen, you can find it here:
You did a beautiful job of providing an overview of tech writing, Alistair. That's why I called the show "All About Tech Writing." :) Any time you'd like to come back and do more shows for us, let me know! I love your smooth presentation.
Thanks Paula. Having been a long-time Writing Show listener, I was delighted to be invited to contribute. I've got to admit, though, that I cringed a little at my opening section (the bit about starting a new job) when I listened back to the podcast the other day. But hopefully your listeners found it interesting.
All the best. Keep those podcasts coming!
Alistair
I completely agree with Paula. It was an excellent, well laid out, interesting and informative overview.
As someone whose career has included technical writing, but hasn't actually centred on it, I found it very useful and has given me confidence by hearing an insider's view on the topic and by confirming some of my own experiences.
I just recently discovered the Communications from DMN podcast. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Anne Gentle of JustWriteClick fame. Anne is a very engaging and enthusiastic speaker and I’d recommend giving this a listen:
I was looking for an alternative to the SpringWidgets widget I used in a previous post, to put in the sidebar of this blog. The SpringWidgets one seems to need to load 100% before starting to play, which is no good because you've browsed to another page long before it's finished loading.
It's a free RSS reader/MP3 player that is incredibly easy to configure. It also set me thinking that what would be good would be, rather than just listing my own podcasts in the player, to offer a mix of other tech writing podcasts, or podcasts that tech writers might find interesting.
I investigated a few options, but by far the easiest way to do this, and configure it just how you want it, is to use Yahoo Pipes. The first half of this video shows how you do it:
Note: The above feed actually comes from Feedburner, but it's got the same content as the one from Yahoo. I just dropped the Yahoo feed into Feedburner because Feedburner gives me a nicer URL and generates some nice stats about how many people download and subscribe to the feed.
When I put this feed URL into the EasyPlayer code generator, I get this:
A nice easy way to help promote other podcasts that you enjoy listening to and want to share with other people.
UPDATE:
OK, so you may have noticed that the embedded EasyPlayer widget doesn't work. It seems to be picky about which feeds it'll play with. It's fine with the RSS feed for ITauthor, but it doesn't like the output from Pipes - even though both EasyPlayer and Pipes are Yahoo creations and the feed I produced from Pipes is valid RSS (I checked).
So here's the same feed in the old, slow-loading, and uglier SpringWidgets player:
UPDATE 2:
My default browser is Firefox and, in Firefox, you can see a SpringWidgets audio player above. Internet Explorer, however, all I can see is a big white space. So my enthusiasm for audio player widgets has just taken a severe dip. I've messed around with both of these widgets for too much of my weekend, so I'm going to give up now. I'll maybe try again in a few months and see if I can find one that's less buggy.
I usually use an old copy of Cubase I have to edit my podcasts. However, I can only run it on one computer and I don't want to uninstall it from my home XP machine to put it on my work Vista laptop, which is what I use most of the time these days.
So I've been trying to use Audacity again. I tried it out a while back but gave up on it because it falls way short of Cubase in many ways, even though my copy of Cubase must be five or six years old now.
However, I had a week off and spent it in Glen Esk and had plenty of time, so I took my laptop and used Audacity to edit podcast 19 - and interview with my mum. The editing is okay after you get the hang of it, though I still find it awkward having to constantly chop and change tools to do things, and with an absence of right-click menus in places. Cubase is just a lot more intuitive and better designed to allow you to do the things you want to do, chopping and moving stuff around quickly.
But the main problem I had was just now when I finally got round to outputting the finished recording to MP3. It came out sounding really bad - particularly, for some reason, the intro/outro music. Even upping it to 128 Mbps didn't improve things. The spoken voice sounded okay but the music sounded really tinny and warbly.
I guessed it was something to do with Audacity's MP3 codec, so I tried outputting to WAV and it seems that I was correct because the 16-bit WAV output sounded fine, and a 32-bit WAV file sounded just like the original, but resulted in a 987 MB file.
I then downloaded FormatFactory (which I'd seen recommended on LifeHacker) and tried converting the 32-bit file. This failed, but the 16-bit PCM WAV file worked fine and the resulting MP3 file sounds about as good as the results I get from Cubase. It's annoying to have to introduce yet more steps into the process of producing a podcast.
However, although I can't recommend Audacity (despite all the plaudits it gets) I can recommend FormatFactory, which is dead easy to use and seems to do the job nicely.
Just a quick note to say I'll be attending the ISTC Conference in Nottingham next week. I'm not known to many (any?) of you, but I plan to get as many faces to blog names as possible while I'm there. So on that note, who else is attending? I hope to grab as many people as possible for impromptu, informal chats that may form the basis of a future podcast. If you'd be willing to donate 5 minutes of your time and insight to the ITAuthor podcast I'd love to hear from you.
When I return I'm sure I'll provide a round-up of the conference either in here or on the podcast itself. Alistair has been away at the UA Conference this week and may provide an update himself when he gets back.
That’s sort of a general feeling I have most of the time: feels like I’m very busy, but also feels like I’m not getting very much done. Anyway, one thing I did get done (a few weeks back now) was a recording for The Writing Show podcast.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm (#)
You did a beautiful job of providing an overview of tech writing, Alistair. That's why I called the show "All About Tech Writing." :) Any time you'd like to come back and do more shows for us, let me know! I love your smooth presentation.
April 9th, 2009 at 8:22 am (#)
Thanks Paula. Having been a long-time Writing Show listener, I was delighted to be invited to contribute. I've got to admit, though, that I cringed a little at my opening section (the bit about starting a new job) when I listened back to the podcast the other day. But hopefully your listeners found it interesting.
All the best. Keep those podcasts coming!
Alistair
April 9th, 2009 at 3:10 pm (#)
Alistair,
Others are far less critical of what we do than we are. You were terrific!
Paula
April 24th, 2009 at 7:46 pm (#)
I completely agree with Paula. It was an excellent, well laid out, interesting and informative overview.
As someone whose career has included technical writing, but hasn't actually centred on it, I found it very useful and has given me confidence by hearing an insider's view on the topic and by confirming some of my own experiences.
Thanks to you both. :)
April 25th, 2009 at 8:04 pm (#)
Thanks for that Matt. I'm really glad to hear you found it useful.