Entries Tagged 'tools' ↓

Myles has issued a challenge to all westcoastbloggers… how do we work? Work? What’s that?

What desktop software do you use every day?

Myles mentions Outlook. I love Outlook. It amazes me with it’s possibilities every day. I can’t wait for Outlook 12. Colour coded lists!

It goes without saying that I use Firefox. And a whole stack of extensions, but the most important one is the Web Developer extension. That and the lorem ipsum generator are fairly essential to my daily work.

When I’m at home, I also use FeedDemon to keep up with the 250-odd RSS feeds that I have. It’s an amazing productivity tool - there’s no way I’d consider checking 250 individual web sites - but FeedDemon brings them all to me.

What web sites do you use every day?

Gmail, Google, del.icio.us. Also eBay but that’s not work. Most web sites that I would list are actually taken care of by FeedDemon. Flickr for sure. And Port80, of course!

What PDA/personal organizer/system do you use to keep organized?

I have a really nice little Asus PDA, but it’s a bit neglected at the moment. I love reading ebooks on it though, when I have time to read fiction (not often lately). PDAs are good for that, and also for playing DopeWars, the greatest computer game ever written. I have a Symbian PDA phone but I really don’t like it anymore. Amazingly, I recently switched back to a nice hard cover notebook and pen. The notebook is lime green (of course) and covered in stickers. The pen is a Bic Intensity Clic, the nicest gel ink pen I have ever found (and I’ve tried heaps).

Hmmm… nothing surprising there! Except maybe the old school notebook.

So, what about the rest of ya?

For those fed up with using spreadsheets to track billable project time, Madpilot Productions has launched 88 Miles.

First up, I will admit that Myles had to point out the Back to the Future reference in the name. Cryptic 80’s movie references aside, the just-launched beta service does exactly what it advertises - simple, uncomplicated time tracking. After setting up your projects, you punch in, punch out, then grab your data as XML when you need it. You can also manually add shifts. While we have an established system at work, I’m thinking of using it to track just how much of my “free” time I’m sinking into some of my side projects. There could be some scary information that comes out of there!

88 Miles is built in Rails and includes some sporty Ajax effects. It’s also a delicious green colour which of course, makes it extra appealing - but really, its beauty is in its simplicity. If you’re thinking of ditching the spreadsheets but don’t want to make your life more complicated, 88 Miles could be just what you need.

An important but often-overlooked part of creating an audio file for podcasting is preparing the transcript.

Having a transcript is important for accessibility reasons, but also because if they’re anything like me, your audience may not have time to listen to the full audio and or might prefer to skim through the transcript to see what your podcast contains. There’s been some debate recently on whether the number of podcast downloads reflects the number of people who actually listen to the audio itself. I have a directory on my computer chock-full mp3s which have been partially or completely ignored which would lend weight to the argument that many people think podcasts are a good idea, but just don’t have the time to listen to them.

In the case of a recording of a live presentation, preparing a transcript - writing down every last thing that the speaker said - sounds like a lot of effort, especially if you weren’t the speaker. However, for US $0.42 per minute, you can get someone else to do the hard work for you at Casting Words. I did this for the March Web Standards Group meeting in Perth, partly as an experiment to see how it turned out, and I’m really impressed with the results.

Ordering the transcript

After preparing the audio files, I uploaded them to my site and filled out an order on the Casting Words web site. They take either individual audio file addresses, or an RSS feed for larger orders. They supply you with an RSS feed address which you can use to track the progress of your order, but as mine was small (2 files) it’s less useful than it would be for, say a whole conference worth of audio casts.

I made my order Friday night my time, and was impressed to find the first transcript in my email when I checked Saturday morning. The second email arrived around 18 hours later, on Sunday morning.

Transcript format

The transcripts arrived as text in the email, with links to rtf, plaint text and html versions on their web site. The HTML was marked up with cite and blockquote elements, which was nice, but with some incorrect nesting so it did not validate. Having a HTML version as a bit of a bonus as I was expecting to have to mark it up myself, but I did have to do quite a bit or reworking to fix the nesting and remove some classes that were also in there.

Quality of the transcript

It was never going to be an easy task: us Aussie tend to speak a bit funny, after all. But on the whole, the quality of the transcribed text was excellent. With the technical topics, I fully expected to have to make some corrections - I actually conned the speakers into doing it themselves - but surprisingly little had to be done. We did a bit of surgery on Nick’s to take out some parts which weren’t relevant to the topic - there were some issues with the mouse he was using, and the presentation kept jumping back to the start. I think some editing is acceptable as the purpose of this kind of transcript is to provide an alternate media version of the audio, not a word-for-word record of what was said.

To summarise…

Overall the Casting Words experience was excellent and I would recommend the service to anyone who wishes to provide transcriptions of podcasts. It was very affordable - the whole exercise cost me AUD $17, for a little over 30 minutes of audio. The results were speedy and accurate, less than 36 hours all up with very few alterations required - and while it would have been nice to cut and paste the html markup directly into my page without having to edit it, having multiple versions of the output was handy.

Not having had much experience with audio production, recording the Perth Web Standards Group presentations involved a bit of a learning curve.

Based on some excellent advice from the other WSG city groups, we managed to get a pretty good result, so I thought I’d share some of the tips and also things I learnt the hard way. While there are a lot of blog posts and articles online about recording a podcast, most are geared towards creating a recording for release, sitting with a headset in front of your computer, not recording a live presentation where there are lots of external factors to consider. Maxine Sherrin presented to the Sydney Web Standards Group on the topic of podcasting an event, based on her experiences with Web Essentials 05 - and yes, a recording of that presentation is available from the WSG. My method is more the small scale seat-of-your-pants style recording, however, and is more suited to small events like user groups and small lectures.

There’s an important distinction between “podcasting” and “making an MP3 file available”. A podcast (and I’m not really liking that term, but anyway) is an audio enclosure made available through an RSS feed. As the Web Standards Group takes care of the RSS bit, all I’m really concerned with here is getting the audio recorded.

Equipment

To record the presentations, I used a Sony minidisc recorder. I had a unit that I paid an exorbitant amount of money for about 6 years ago when MP3 players were still a major novelty and the iPod still a twinkle in Mr Jobs’ eye. The built-in rechargeable battery on my recorder was long dead, but it had a caddy for a single AA battery and that was still working fine. I was pretty stoked to have found a new use for the poor thing, which had been sitting in its box unused for at least the last four years. Newer versions of the same unit are significantly cheaper - I found one for sale online for AUD $99 brand new. There’s also a new type of media that stores 1GB (the old ones have the same capacity as a standard CD).

I bought a Sony tie/lapel microphone for the princely sum of $30. I don’t know if that’s bottom or top of the range, as it was the only one they had a Dick Smith’s, but it’s a Sony so I figured it must be ok and the results were very good. It didn’t come with a battery of course, so that was another $4 (it took a watch/calculator style battery).

While I was at it I invested in a pack of blank minidiscs as they are magneto-optical media and probably don’t last forever, and mine had been in the box with the unit for a few years. JB Hi-Fi only stocked one type of one brand and only in a 5-pack, so that was another $15. I also made sure I had spare AA batteries just in case.

Setting up and recording

The speaker clipped the mic onto their shirt and put the minidisc unit in a pocket. The minidisc recorder had a ‘lock’ switch so I made sure that was on in case the unit got knocked around in the speaker’s pocket and switched off accidentally. Unfortunately the on-switch on the back of the mic didn’t have that capability, and one of the speakers accidentally turned it off while clipping it on, so that’s something to be careful of. Before sending them on to speak I did a quick record and playback test to make sure the mic wasn’t being obstructed - in this case I used ear buds to check the recording level. Being in a hurry I had one ear plugged in only and couldn’t work out why the first test wasn’t working. Eventually I realised the ear bud I had plugged in wasn’t working properly, and the other ear bud was ok, and the recording was working after all. Minor heart attack averted.

In our case the speakers weren’t using an amplified mic. We held our event in the Edith Cowan University Tavern (we were the only people in there) and it would have been small enough for the speaker to be heard clearly without amplification, except for the very noisy refrigerator behind the bar. While this made it a bit of a challenge to hear the speakers, particularly one who had a quiet voice, fortunately the noise wasn’t carried through to the recording. Next time we’re having the speaking part of the event in a lecture theatre close to the tavern so we won’t have that problem again.

Both our speakers invited questions from the audience both during and after their presentations. On the final podcasts, sometimes you can hear the question clearly and sometime you can’t, depending on how loud the questioner was and how far they were sitting from the speaker. In future, I will make sure the presenter repeats the question for the benefit of the recording - and for the benefit of the rest of the audience, if the question was hard to hear.

Because I’m paranoid, I changed the AA battery in the recorder between speakers and popped in a fresh minidisc just in case disaster occurred and the first recording got overwritten with the second.

Digitising

I downloaded Audacity, an open source audio application, to do my audio editing. Transferring from the minidisc recorder to PC was as simple as plugging in the cable, hitting record in Audacity and play on the minidisc unit.

Based on some advice from other WSG members, I ran a normalise filter (to equalise the volume across the recording), then a high pass (to remove excess hiss) and low pass (to remove excess boom). This made the recording very quiet, so I normalised again. I worked out later that I probably shouldn’t have normalised before I ran the high and low pass filters but the end result sounded ok to me so I didn’t think it was worth starting over.

To render the Audacity project down to MP3 I went with a 32kbps bit rate and 16kHz sample rate, as these settings seem to be the norm for other podcasts that I downloaded. The file sizes seemed pretty reasonable - just under 5MB for the 22 minute presentation and just over 2MB for the 10 minute presentation - so I was happy with that. Finally I added ID3 information - artist (speaker), album title (Web Standards Group), Genre (Other), Title (presentation title), and comments (date and location recorded). Although there’s a thousand ways to edit the ID3 tags on an MP3 file I did it straight from the summary tab of the Windows file property dialog.

In conclusion…

I’m pretty happy with the end result. It was suggested that as they have recording capability it might be easier to record with an iPod, as the file is digital to start with. Seeing as I don’t have an iPod and I do have a minidisc recorder on hand I went with what I had. I’m not sure of the recording quality of the iPod or if the recording is compressed at all to start with - at any rate the minidisc player produces an outstanding quality recording and the process was not difficult so I will probably continue recording WSG presentations this way.

Next task was getting the transcript done… but that’s a post for another day.

podcasting audio recording

Do you Squidoo? If you’re marketing something, there’s a new tool that might be useful.

I’ve been playing with Squidoo - I’d read about it when Seth Godin first announced it, but didn’t check it out fully until I read about Darren Rowes’ experimentations with it.

So what is it? It’s like About.com with a more democratic editorial process, where anyone can be an editor of their own “lense” - a page on a particular topic. The idea is that the most popular lenses rise to the top of the pile. It’s very “Web 2.0″ - I can’t describe it without getting all buzzwordy, sorry! The Squidoo slogan “everyone’s an expert on something” pretty much describes what it’s all about.

So, off I went and started creating. The sign up process was straightforward, with some nice Ajax touches - when selecting a lens name, for example, it checks what you’ve entered when the field loses focus and lets you know if your choice has already been taken. The process of learning how to edit your lense - potentially quite a large curve - was simple, for me anyway. Someone not so familiar with web applications might have some more trouble. After I had finished, I discovered a link in the footer to “SquidU” - a large online tutorial area. Surprising that it’s not more obvious during the creation process. Or maybe I’m blind.

Next I added some “modules” - RSS feeds, links lists, technorati tag feeds (which don’t seem to be working), and Amazon affliate links. The Amazon angle is presumably how Squidoo will eventually be monetized, along with the Google AdSense ads. When the service gets out of beta, there will apparently be a revenue sharing arrangement with the lense authors. Interesting concept.

So ta-da! Here’s the final product: Best Practises Web Development. There’s more stuff I would like to have done - mostly more links, and some feeds - but I’m stuck on dialup at the moment and editing is just too painfully slow. I don’t know if it will be something worth maintaining - but it certainly was an interesting process.