‘Twas a busy week on +Unwind Media! We wrapped Season 1 of Feedback, which means Volume 1 of Feedback: The Music can’t be far off! As well as regular episodes of Ottawhat? and Future Chat, the next phase of #Taylorette1989 launched. I’m looking for a video or story about what’s special about my fiancée Julia, and stories about +Taylor Swift! I’d love to hear your favourite memories of Taylor!
Tag: Unwind
Feedback wraps Season 1, and #Taylorette1989 hits Phase 2 (Unwind Media | May 14-20)
In this final episode of season 1 of Feedback, we discuss YouTube’s role in the fight against music loudness, the new Mumford and Sons album Wilder Mind…RSS |This week’s episode features Keegan’s brother Branden On! He’s into all kinds of creative endeavours like acting, playing music, and drawing. We also hear…RSS |This week, are Google cars less safe than human-driven ones, Nick uses his pirate voice several times, and we all lust after $1000 blenders (or do we?)…RSS |SoundCloud, Writing, and #Taylorette1989 heats up. (Unwind Media; May 7-13)
This week we made a couple of substantial changes on Unwind Media, most notably we’re making the transition to hosting audio files on SoundCloud, as opposed to Archive.org. I’m pretty excited for that, and I even wrote a little bit about some of the neat tricks I am using now to get those files to work with podcast clients and on the podcast website while keeping the setup simple.
I also wrote a little more for MobileSyrup, rather than linking to all of them, you can find those stories by using a custom Google Search (for ‘site:mobilesyrup.com “Rob Attrell” ‘)one of the hosts on Unwind Media and my cousin, +Mike Attrell, came up with to find things I’ve written.
In other news, #Taylorette1989 is entering its next phase, as +Taylor Swift begins her world tour and gets ready to launch her latest music video. Look for more on that in the next week! As well, there’s a new episode of Feedback coming before the end of the week, so that means a fun conversation, AND 2 more cover tunes from Damien and BL in the next week or so! Stay tuned!
On Ottawhat this week, we met former UFC fighter and Ottawa native Mark “Boots” Holst. He spoke to us about his experiences in the ring, teaching the new…RSS |In this episode, Tesla goes gangbusters, it’s zeppelins vs. dirigibles, and trucks are driving themselves in Nevada. Get excited, because we’ll be deliver…RSS |Adventures in Podcasting with SoundCloud (Volume I)
.code {
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}I’ve been podcasting and building my website for a couple of years now, and I thought it would be useful to some people if I talked about some of the things I’ve gone through in getting my site up and running that I couldn’t find anywhere else on the Internet. This one is all about podcasting efficiently with SoundCloud.
Now, I’m not a professional programmer by ANY stretch, but I like getting my feet wet with little bits of code from time to time. I also podcast a few times a week, and sometimes I’m lucky enough that these hobbies overlap! I recently moved my podcasts to SoundCloud, and they have a really nice web player (check out unwindmedia.com/feedback for a prime example). But I wanted to simplify my life and use one link for the RSS feed and for the web player embed.
Luckily, they use a unique ID number for each upload to SoundCloud, it’s just a matter of finding it. It is a 9-digit number smack in the middle of the enclosure URL that SoundCloud uses for RSS, something like this:
http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/204094299-channelname-episodename.mp3
With a bit of Regex and replace magic (/.*/(d+)-.*/, “$1”) and some simple jQuery, I can extract that number, plunk it into the embed URL (see this page), and stick that into your container div.
Once you have that embed URL, you just have to put in all the embed options you want for your widget, and you’re good to go!
As SoundCloud opens up their platform to make it easier for podcasters, I hope this helps you simplify your life. I personally used this code on my Blogger site (unwindmedia.com) so I can have an audio player on my site that uses the enclosure link for the podcast episode, but in SoundCloud’s native player. It’s working incredibly well and I’m moving all my shows to this template in the coming weeks.
The code I used is below, and you can see it in action online at unwindmedia.com! If you have any questions please ask and I’ll give you all the details you could ever want!
EDIT (May 8): I made the code a lot simpler and got rid of redundant divs. Hopefully this is even simpler now.
<div class=’”sound-container-” + “POST-ID”‘/><script>
$(document).ready(function() {var idVal = ‘POST-ID’;
var idTrack = ‘ENCLOSURE-URL’;
var encl = idTrack.replace(/.*/(d+)-.*/, “$1”);
var open = “<iframe frameborder=’no’ height=’160′ scrolling=’no’ src=’https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/”;
var close = “&color=1C4E94&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_artwork=false’ width=’100%’/>”;
$(‘.sound-container-‘ + idVal).append(open + encl + close);
});
</script>The Future is Back again! (April 7-14)
Future Chat is back with Season 2! This week featured the triumphant return of our science and tech show, as well as a great interview with Ottawa photographer, Justin Van Leeuwen..title {
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We’re back with Season 2 of Future Chat. We’re well rested and chatted about giant telescopes, the end of Soylent flatulence, and tiny, tiny “computers”.
RSS |In this episode, we talked to Justin Van Leeuwen, a local photographer who somehow manages to balance spending time with his kids and photographing some of the city’s most important people!
RSS |This Week in Podcasts (March 30 – April 6)
One more week and +Future Chat is back with Season 2! To hold you over, +Mike Attrell and I talked a little about some of what we’ve been thinking about in the tech world in the last year. Wearable tech, cloud storage and advertising were all under scrutiny from us..title {
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This week, I talk to my cousin Mike Attrell once again, catching up on our digital lives and discussing things we’d like to have on our wrists, advertising as TV moves online, and how we approach our lives online, both storing things, and making and keeping friends.RSS |This week, we sat down with Natalie Stewart, an elementary school teacher and Camp Quality volunteer coordinator. She discussed her career as a teacher and some of the differences between teaching various grade levels.RSS |3 Things That Happened This Week (& Social News)
Since Future Chat is still on haitus until April, we only had one show last week, but it was a really great episode of Ottawhat with Waubgeshig Rice from CBC Ottawa! This week proper, I chatted with Nick about my experiences on Universal Time (aka GMT) and how living 4 hours in the future is making my life better in some pretty interesting ways, and confuses everyone around me. We also sat down with Jantine Van Kregten from Ottawa Tourism on Ottawhat to learn how our city encourages people to visit, and helps them out once they’re here. Interesting stuff and a great interview!We also underwent a nice set of changes at unwindmedia.com, it’s a lot easier to follow and subscribe to shows as they have their own landing pages with show info now. We also added a couple of Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for East Meets West (@_emwFM/East Meets West) and Feedback (@_FeedbackFM/Feedback) this week (we also moved Future Chat’s Twitter account to @_FutureChatFM), you can follow or like those to keep up with news for those shows specifically.
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This week, daylight savings woes, Nick’s massive Canadian Election blog oeuvre, and faux punditry among the Conservative elite. Should Alberta collect sales tax? We think so!RSS |In this episode, we talked to Jantine Van Kregten, the incredibly knowledgable director of communications at Ottawa Tourism.In this episode, we sat down with Waubgeshig Rice. He’s a video journalist working for the CBC in Ottawa, he’s published a book of short stories and last year put out a novel called Legacy.RSS |