I thought I’d have a look at some new podcasts on iTunes as a lot I was subscribing to appear to have stalled and I haven’t received any updates in a while.

Signed up for ‘Album’s you should hear’, where they talk about classic rock albums but don’t play any of the music. I thought they could have played the odd 10 seconds under fair use. The do ramble a bit and should limit themselves to 30 minutes but what the heck. I never knew that Scott Walker’s Scott 4 could generate so much enthusiasm.

Also signed up for ‘BBC History Magazine’, not that I’m particularly interested in history but it’s interesting enough (If that isn’t damning with faint praise…Ed). A couple of book review podcasts with The New York Times Book Review and also one with Simon Mayo of the BBC. Business Technology & You by Bloomberg, The New Yorker: Comment & Fiction, Science on Guardian Unlimited, Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American and a few soundtrack music podcasts.

Vista

Why is Vista so sluggish. Often when I click on something there is a discernible wait before anything happens. It’s like Vista is considering options before it decides it’s gonna do what you want it to do. Othertimes I click on something and nothing happens at all, the mouse click is just not recognised by Vista. Then when I click the same control a second time it will be registered and eventually actioned. This actually happens a lot.

Quote of the day

‘Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is needed. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps’ David Lloyd George (1863-1945)

I thought I’d add a chat client and forum to the blog and checked to see what the hosting company provide and it was a bit underwhelming.

I tried and found both and neither worked very well and they looked hopeless. Very basic CGI. So I’ll have a hunt around for some jazzy javascript versions. It would be good if I could get some Ajax stuff working too.

I’ve been listening to some blog marketing podcasts and oddly, bearing in mind the guy is into marketing, the presentation was hopeless. He uses Talkshoe to record them and by the sound of it phones the podcast in as the sound quality is so bad. He really is just chatting to people and we the podcast listeners are just listening to a phone conversation. There are periods of silence, coughs, splutters, technical glitches. You name it, it’s on there.

But the content is terrific. I listened to the first cast last week and then did nothing but listen to all of the rest he had recorded. Then I listened to the whole lot a second time. Coughs and all. He certainly has great ideas on marketing and how to promote your blog. Other ideas were to advertise yourself on www.craiglist.org and Twitterific. Also he mentioned a ping engine called www.ping.in which pings 20-30 blog search engines, though only about 40% were successfull. That got me searching for other ping engines and I found several. According to the statistics (Not that word again. Ed) I was pinged, from all of the engines, at least 100 times, though I’m not convinced they showed up on the various stats tools I use.

I’m still trying to make some sense of the Google Analytics stats. I have a feeling that if tried to rationalise the statistics displayed by Google Anlytics, those provided by the hosting company from their own raw log files and the stats displayed on Deep Log Analyser I would go beserk. So I won’t. Instead I’ll just use them as a rough guide. This will allow me to say with great authority ‘yesterday I had between 300 and 500 hits and may have had 700 blog entries read’.

Had a go at installing iTunes 7.1.1 on Vista and it appeared to work even though the Apple site doesn’t say it’s Vista compatible.

Downloaded a podcast and played that back from beginning to end and that was OK. iTunes did a search and found some music that must have been on the PC when I bought it and added it to the library OK. Haven’t ripped a CD yet.

Downloaded the latest version of Forte Agent, which also didn’t say it was Vista compatible, and that installed OK. Pointed it at my news server, subscribed to a music newsgroup, downloaded the headers and then downloaded a single track, which played back OK. Got iTunes to import that track which it did OK and was able to play the track in iTunes.

Tried the Newsbin Pro newsgroup reader which downloaded and installed OK. Pointed that at the news server and subscribed to a couple of newsgroups. Tried to download the headers but nothing happened. Don’t know if that is a Vista induced problem, or a Newsbin problem. Its been awhile since I’ve used Newsbin and I remember it ‘worked’ in a slightly odd way, or at least that is what I thought with my twisted logic. Or it could just be a bit of my own gross incompetence that failed to get it to download the headers. May have another go at that later.

I’ve been subscribing to a lot of podcasts recently and several have been really good but a lot do sound like you are overhearing a private telephone conversation. And I’m not just talking about the sound quality. They need heavy editing but that is unlikely to happen.

Quote of the day

‘You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club’ Jack London (1876-1916)