I added a couple new plugins to the ol' Magic of Eyri website today.  The most important being on that includes links at the bottom of each episode post to share the link with your social-networking poison of choice. This is something I've seen on other websites and have been wanting to emulate. Well, thanks to jimhines and his post about the Wordpress plugins on his site, I found what I was looking for. Now listeners can share an episode with Facebook, Twitter, etc with one simple click. I like.

I also added a plugin that generates a simple Contact page with a form you fill out--it is essentially the same thing as 'commenting' on a page, just that no one but me sees it. I also like.

And I think I'm going to switch my blogging to danieljhogan.com--but thanks to Mr. Hines, I have also found a plugin that'll mirror my posts to LJ, thus killing two birds with one stone. Speaking of birds, I think my daily Twitter dumps will be an LJ exclusive. Aren't you guys lucky? I know not everyone is a fan, but I do like that my LJ gets updated daily because of it. And honestly, i seem to get more comments on those posts than the rest.

I'lll let everyone know when/if my blogging shifts to the other site. But I think it'll happen. I like what I can do with WordPress and I don't like having a blog that is full of ads I have no control over. The only problem is, I have around 400 business cards that still list this LJ as my blog. Sigh. But, if I do the mirroring thing, that won't matter.  

So I've been doing this podcast thing for a bit and decided I should probably check and see if anyone is actually listenin'.  According to the FeedBurner bug on my front page, I have 18 subscribers--and this number seems to change daily. It'll go up, then down, then up a little bit and down a little bit--but it seems to hover around 18 or 20 every few days.

Now, I know that this isn't an exact representation of who is visiting the site and listening, as I have family and friends that I have to email a link to every time a new episode is up. Let's look at the hard data:

So far in 2009:

hits for magicofeyri.com: 3,362
hits for magicofeyri.com/feed (the RSS feed): 2,570

Since podcast launch in April:
hits for episode 001 page: 163
hits for episode 001 .MP3: 94

hits for episode 002 page: 84
hits for episode 002 .MP3: 61

hits for episode 003 page: 74
hits for episode 003 .MP3: 53

It appears I'm actually getting less listeners with each new episodes--BUT, the thing to remember is that episodes 001 and 002 have been online longers than episode 003 (like a good month longer I think). And the difference between the .MP3 downloads for 002 and 003 is only eight downloads--not that much, considering 003 has only been online for two weeks.

I'm trying to base my audience more on the .MP3 hits/downloads than the page views because if someone visits the page that doesn't mean the're listening.  And considering my podcast has only been up and running a little over a month, I'd say these are encouraging numbers. I need to get better about reminding people episodes are up (mainly friends and fam), I can think of at least eight people I know who haven't listened to episode 003 yet.

EDIT: What I also forgot to mention is that I have built in media players on the page for each episode (thanks to the PodPress plugin) and what I don't know is if a listener just listens to it on the page, if that counts as a .MP3 hit/download or not.
 
Episode 004 is online now!

Today is the day gang, Ep001 of the Magic of Eyri Podcast is online. Give it a listen. Remember, this is a free podcast. And you can subscribe via the iTunes store as well.

Ep001 is a little rough around the edges in spots because I was just learning how to do all of this stuff and was using a borrowed microphone. I'm getting better with each episode in regards to recording, acting and mixing. Ep002 will be online Sunday, April 26th (going for an every other week, two a month, release schedule).

I love that I can schedule posts for magicofeyri.com thanks to WordPress. I just finished everything for Magic of Eyri Podcast Ep001, which will publish itself this Sunday at 1 PM (EDT).

It'll be nice not to have to worry about it on Sunday, as I'll be partaking in family stuff for Easter.  I doubt I could sneak away long enough to upload the episode, type up the show notes and post everything. I may even get Ep002 ready to go this weekend too, just so I don't have to worry about it. Might as well, the episode is done. Hurray for automation.

Ep003 is almost done (as well as the script for Ep004), I'm just piecing everything together in GarageBand. I'd like to get that done tomorrow morning if possible, we'll see though.  The things that take up the most time with putting together episodes (after the recording) is choosing sound effects and music.  I know I could just skip that stuff, but I like the extra touch music and sound effects give.  I don't do music and sound effects for every little thing, but what I do decide to do can add up.

In other news, I was asked about contributing a comic strip to an upcoming Michigan film industry magazine.  I said yes and pitched a couple of ideas and got the OK to start doing samples.  The idea I wanna go with is (tentativly) called Three Panel Theater. I take a film and condense it down to three (humorous) panels.  Similar to IFCs 30 second films with bunnies I realize, but film spoofs have been around for decades in comics (look at Mad Magazine for example).

I don't want to do a comic that is too time consuming, as the podcast eats up a lot of my free time, so that's why I like this idea.  I'll probably do some kind of stick-figure like art, we'll see. If they like it, they like it. If not, then whatever. At least I tried. I'm gonna draw on paper (probably with a blue pencil, non-mechanical. We don't get along), scan it, and ink in either Flash or Photoshop--but I'll probably go with Flash due to the vector art aspect (yeah, I know I need to learn Illustrator).

The FeedBurner feed for the Magic of Eyri Podcast is up and running. This means I now have a running total of my subscribers on my website--it is 5 at the moment, but I think 3 of those are me because I subscribed on Google Reader, Yahoo and iTunes to test it out. And I have a feeling the other two might be my dad (but if not, woo hoo!). Setting up the Feedburner feed was easy and is a must for any podcast (according to Podcasting for Dummies).

I also put together a cover art piece that'll show up in the feed and on peoples iPods:

It contains art done for me by Michael Church (Steve and Uncle Shameless--although I colored Uncle Shameless), Romel Clawson (the Blue Heron Amulet) and Kevin Knipstein (the purple title logo). I'm really happy with how that turned out--and if you go to the front page of the website, you'll see Steve and Uncle Shameless at the top as well as a silhouette of the blue heron amulet at the bottom (thanks to some Photoshop handy work on my part).

And I created a favicon for the website (the tiny graphic that shows up in your address bar), but it only shows up if you have Firefox (I have to put in some code for Internet Explorer to find it, another reason to hate IE).

One of the good side effects of all this podcasting nonsense is that it is forcing me to learn more web design stuff: setting up and maintaining a WordPress blog, tweaking HTML, setting up RSS feeds, etc.

I'm also learning more about audio stuff, which is fun. For episode two I decided to record everything separately in Audacity and then put it together in GarageBand. This way I'll have the raw audio files (.AIF) as a back up in case GarageBand goes crazy (which I'll lower the chances of by not recording stuff in it). So far this process is making things easier and faster. I recorded all of the Narrator lines the other night in about two hours (65 lines of dialogue) and all of Steve's lines in about an hour a few nights after that (about 23 lines of dialogue--most of which were two words or less). Recording all the lines of one 'character' at a time is kind of nice, because I'm not switching between the Narrator, Steve and Uncle Shameless every line like I did for episode one. It certainly helps me stay in character longer.

I'm by no means done with the website, but I''m getting closer. The good thing is that all this stuff is just on the front end, once I have it set up I don't have to worry about it every month and I can just worry about episodes.

I also submitted the Feed to the iTunes Podcast Directory and I'm waiting for approval. I don't see a reason why I wouldn't get approved, so hopefully that'll get taken care of soon.

First: Was inspired to install WordPress stuff onto danieljhogan.com, thus scraping what has been there since...oh, early 2007 or late 2006.  Well, things didn't go 'xactly as planned:I own three domains on the same server space (danieljhogan.com, magicofeyri.com and themagicofeyri.com) and I thought that accessing each through my FTP thingy was going to a whole different area. Not so much.  They all share the same root directory (or whatever).

So, I couldn't just dump the WordPress stuff on to danieljhogan.com and be good. No, that conflicted with the WordPress stuff I had on themagicofeyri.com (the database things however were not an issue, as my provider allows me to have up to 25 databases).  The problem here was conflicting index dot html files. The way I avoided this situation in the past is that I used my provider's built in webpage creation software, so everything we directed to the folders the sites were contained in.

I'll gladly admit that I don't know much at all about webstuff, so this was a bit of a hard lesson. I tried forwarding danieljhogan.com to danieljhogan.com/home (the directory where I put the wordpress stuff, thus solving the problem), but WordPress didn't like that. Eventulaly, I solved the problem by just creating an 'Enter' page with the built in software and haaving that directo to the WordPress thing. Oy, what a task.

Honestly though, I'm thankful this happened and that I'm on this fool's errand of podcasting my book--it finally made me get off my duff and revamp my websites. Have a lot of work to do on changing them, but it'll be worth it. I may just build everything up on themagicofeyri.com and have magicofeyri.com forward there, we'll see though.

Second: got my Zoom H2 recorder/microphone in today and it works great.  The high point of the evening was discovering that I can use the Line In feature on it to convert my vinyl to .MP3s.  I'll have to play with that to get the settings and such right but the test I did worked (it can record right to .MP3).

third: Tried copying the podcast GarageBand file over to my iBook but the iBook did not like it, so work shall continue on the eMac.  I'll start the next episdoe on the iBook and see how that goes.  I just think that GarageBand doesn't like files moving around. the H2 worked just fine as a USB mic, again I'm still toying with it to figure out the correct settings and postioning, but I like it. Can't wait to try it at band practice.