Snortblog

This is a picture of the sunrise this morning over the little Colorado River in Austin, Texas, United States.

You have to get up really early.

I love This American Life (TAL). It’s a wonderful public radio show. In each episode, they have stories that revolve around a particular theme, like this week’s theme, entitled “fiasco”. I’ve had my eye on their website for several years. They’ve made their shows available in the Real Media format for as long as I’ve visited their site. Real Media is not exactly handy for listening to with an mp3 player, but by using audio capture software like Audacity, it wouldn’t be hard to convert shows into the mp3 format for happy unencumbered personal listening, though this probably isn’t what TAL intended. At long last, TAL added mp3 files to the site. Then somebody went to the trouble of repackaging links to mp3s on the TAL website as an RSS feed, thus making it easy for anybody with podcasting client software like iTunes or Juice to get it. Apparently, TAL wasn’t too happy about this; they apparently contacted the poor sod and asked him to take down the feed. However, TAL rose to the challenge.

This American Life has made a podcast feed available. It only has one show in it now, I hope they make more available at one time instead of making people work harder to get them. They also offer an option so you can donate to help pay for bandwidth. The next step would involve making bittorrent files available so we could donate bandwidth.

I planted Kagraner Sommer butterhead lettuce and Red Sails leaf lettuce today.

If you need a hosting provider for your domain, by all means avoid Network Solutions.

• Their website sucks. It’s bandwidth intensive and loads a ton of irrelevant marketing images that get in the way.
• You can’t get to the administration panels on their website without getting a number of nag screens which attempt to sell you things you don’t need and usually don’t want.
• They send numerous irrelevant emails to your whatever email address you may have been foolhardy enough to provide. Don’t let it happen to you. If you use Gmail, you can set up a website specific email address. You could also use a temporary email address.
• In my experience, their technical support staff is not knowledgeable and can’t do common things like assigning new DNS servers without escalating to an engineer. I’ve had several phone calls get sucked into their black hole of technical support, never to be returned.

If this is right, then this means that any body count cited to justify the invasion of Iraq in order to overthrow Sadamm Hussein is now moot. But what’s a couple hundred thousand dead between former allies?

I was doing some research and realized that most podcasts feeds aren’t very accessible. Accessibility, in this context, requires that the same information should be present in multiple formats, so, for example, people with hearing impairments have the option of reading transcripts of what people say in an audio file. The specification for RSS 2.0 allows for one enclosure per item, an item being the podcast, and the enclosure being an mp3 file, in this case. There’s really no place to put a transcript as a supplemental file. A work around is to include a link to it in the encoded description. However, the media RSS module extends RSS 2.0 to allow for more stuff per item, e.g. transcripts. Google video uses the media RSS module in one of their RSS feeds, but it doesn’t appear to have been widely adopted by other podcasters. Wordpress doesn’t use it, and the PodPress extension doesn’t appear to use it either. Security Now’s podcast feed doesn’t use it but their main page includes regular old links to transcripts. The ideal would be to transform a dynamically-generated RSS feed into multiple formats (e.g. html, pdf) using XSL automatically so you could have just one source. Until more work is done, the alternative appears to be hand coding in links to transcripts in order to make them accessible. If the media RSS module was implemented, a person with hearing loss could theoretically use an RSS reader to just fetch the transcripts of individual episodes, and disregard the mp3 enclosure altogether.

There’s a nice site that uses a Google maps mashup for sharing bike routes from all over the world, it’s www.bikely.com. Check it out!