I’m lying here sick today. It’s nothing major, just a cold mixed with a sore throat. To pass the time, I’ve been browsing blogs. I ran into one earlier that I thought was frightening, but I had taken medication for my cold so I might have been hallucinating.

The blog didn’t have long teeth or dark, deep-seeded eyes. Actually the blog looked normal as normal could be. It had two columns, a white background, a header image of flowers (or was it grass?), and numerous posts.

Now before I get to the blog’s posts, I just want to state that I had never commented, dropped Entrecards or anything on this blog. It was like it just surfaced out of thin air, like that ghost in a movie about ghosts (but not the one with Patrick Swayze).

So here I am, listening to the news on TV, trying to make my headache disappear by reading some popular blogs. I surfed a few, commented on a tax entry, jumped over to read about a crazy stunt, and then I landed on this blog with the nondescript pages and the inviting header. It doesn’t seem scary, right? It’s just a normal blog.

I know what you’re wondering. What kind of blog was it? Was it a Make Money Online blog? Was it a personal diary? An affiliate site? Maybe it was a scantily clad female’s blog recounting her nights out at the club. Or was it a police officer’s blog where he talked in code about the arrests he made. Maybe it was an anonymous blog — a white page with black lettering, and someone posting about love, death, pain, or misery. Maybe it was one of those.

It’s message was fuzzy.

I heard the music startup as soon as the page loaded. But I’m hallucinating, right? No one would want to play music on a blog. Maybe I’m living in 1997. Had I somehow slipped through a wormhole? I’d heard strange stories of Robitussin, but never anything quite this bad. I closed my eyes and listened to the tune for a moment, realizing I had to be in 2008. The sounds were too urban, not 90s enough.

But what could this person be hoping to gain with music auto-playing on their web page? Did they feel it would lull their visitors into a state of suspense, waiting to hear how the notes petered out? Would they turn off their music planning to listen to the notes of this site? Why not, right?

The music started to pick up its pace — a frightening staccato sound, like Psycho times two. I’m fairly certain voices could be heard through the drum beats. I checked the address. It wasn’t Myspace. For a split second longer, I hung there with the sidebar widgets still loading. I knew what I had to do.

Ctrl + W!

Part One dealt with recording and manipulating your voice. For those who came in late, you can learn about Audacity’s use for Podcast.

Ok, where was I? I had just finished recording my booming voice, but I didn’t know how to  integrate the podcast into Wordpress?

I asked Google this question and found there to be a few plugins that deal with podcasting.  (If you have experience with any I found, please let me know.)

PodPress: supposedly the perfect plugin to get your podcast out to the world. It features automatic RSS creation for every major arena, including iTunes and BitTorrent, download options, graphical stats, and audio comments to name just a few.

I may give this a shot. To be honest, I overlooked this plugin on my first pass. I think this may be the most suitable solution.

PodCasting: I tried this plugin. It created the white page of PHP death on WordPress version 2.3.3. Supposedly it works for that, but I had to diagnose the error at the server log level. I finally gave up and deleted the plugin folder. The plugin can do some of what PodPress claims to accomplish. It was created during the Google Summer of Code 2007.

Plugin Tune Out

The PodPress solution would have been perfect, but I overlooked it. After fiddling with the Podcasting plugin to no avail, I decided to turn on FeedBurner’s SmartCast feature. This basically allows you to syndicate different forms of media. You have a few options when you configure SmartCast, including creating enclosures for audio, video, or image files, linking in a podcast image file, and entering title, and keywords. This all helps integrating your podcast with iTunes and other services.

So after I activated the SmartCast feature, I created a post, made a link to the podcast, and published. When I tested my feed in Google Reader, the media enclosure worked fine. I had a podcast with the media right there in the feed. Now I only needed people to listen to it. But that part I left up to all of you.

I didn’t wholly understand what a podcast brought to a blog and to an audience. It develops the richness of communication and opens up a whole new level of interaction with site visitors. If you’re thinking of doing a podcast, I encourage you to make the leap. I enjoyed making my first podcast, and hope to continue the practice in the future.

Last week I was very busy with various work efforts and with this blog. I did manage to post my first podcast. I was inspired by some of the podcasts I listened to a few weeks ago, and thought why not do my own. Over a few weeks time, I traversed the internet in search of some help on creating my first podcast. I found it, but it was in many different places. I decided to put it all together in an end-all-be-all-podcast post smörgåsbord! I hope you enjoy part one of this two part podcast series.

Podcasting Tools

My need to podcast led me high and low for the perfect solution to recording my voice. Of course, to do this on your computer you first need a quality headset or microphone. I used a microphone headset specifically designed for Skype. It worked well, and gave me the ability to move around a little while I was recording. Everyone’s preference may vary on this piece of equipment.

Once you’ve found the right mic, you need the right software to record your voice. I found many sites recommending Audacity as the perfect open source solution to audio recording. I first downloaded the program to my Ubuntu machine, then remembered Linux is still terrible with audio, so I downloaded it on Vista.

Using Audacity to Record a Podcast

At first Audacity looked like one of those giant soundboards at a rock concert, I was just standing back trying to figure out the knobs. I toyed with recording audio, making the obligatory noises to test decibels. One, two, three — voila! I had recorded my very own audible countdown. I was on the road to podcast mastery. Well, not quite yet.

I now had my voice recorded, so i simply closed out the audio track (the small X inside the program), and began recording for real. I must say I did most of the Boombox Episode One podcast in one take. I tried the opening a few times though, but the bulk of it was one recording. After I nailed it, I realized I forgot to say one thing in particular. I had already stopped recording and couldn’t figure out how to start recording inside a specific time.

I selected the end of the audio file with the finger pointer, then on the toolbar I selected record. This action created a new audio track, where I could say what I wanted to say. I recorded the few seconds worth of information and now had to figure out how to plug that blurb into the existing podcast.

Pasting Audio in Audacity

You can copy and paste pieces of audio in Audacity. Before you can do any copying or pasting, make sure you have not simply paused the recording but completely stopped it. You cannot paste when the recording is simply paused. Now you can select the portion of the audio you want to copy by dragging from left to right across the audio file. Once you have the area selected you want to copy, just hit CTRL-C or select Edit>Copy. Now go to Audio Track 1 inside your Audacity window, use the finger to select where you want the audio pasted, then hit CTRL-V or Edit>Paste.

When I finished, I disliked the number of “ums” and wanted a way to strip those. I highlighted these “ums” and also removed some of the more obvious pauses in my podcast. This tightened up the audio and allowed me more freedom when recording. I could curse and mutter all I wanted, just as long as I remembered to cut those out of the end product.

I saved the audio file as an Audacity Project file, but also exported it to MP3 format. I then uploaded the MP3 to my server in order to stream the podcast.

At this point, I have my Audio podcast ready to be streamed. I don’t know quite how to do this though. I searched online. I watched tutorial videos. I installed faulty plugins that momentary took down my site. How did I get the podcast to work with Wordpress? You’ll have to wait for Part Two to find out how I got the podcast to work with Wordpress. Stay tuned!

How to Podcast with Audacity and Wordpress Part Two is now online.

Last night I took the time to install the WP-cache plugin. I held off installing this plugin due to knowing nothing about it. I was afraid if I installed it, I might cripple my site, forcing me to ressurect an older backup then reconfigure. After reassuring myself, I stepped through the fear.

I figured WP-cache was a good solution since my site would sometimes hang while loading various ads on the sidebar. I knew a cache would fix those types of problems. So I searched the Blogosphere for information on completing the chore.

I found many sites describing the process. I found most of the trouble was with permissions. Thus another search began for securing Wordpress when using the wp-cache plugin. I found an article detailing how to handle security problems with the wp-cache plugin installation. It helped me straighten out some of the finer points. Once I finished with that, I tweaked an .htaccess file then checked out the wp-cache administration area.

Administering the Cache
You can modify how long a cache page remains on the server. The default of 3,600 seconds (60 minutes) seems like a good amount of time for the traffic I receive. I kept everything the way it was, after toying with all the settings of course. Then I went back to my home page and right clicked to select view source.

My page was loading in half a second! I wanted to see what other sites had in terms of speed. I felt like a grease monkey webmaster daring to look underneath the hoods of others’ sites. I knew Problogger uses the wp-cache plugin. His site would crash often if it wasn’t for the cache. I visited his page and right clicked to view the source. That’s when something interesting happened.

I understand why the Problogger site loads slower than my own. I do. That wasn’t the realization that occurred. What did occur? I discovered a few monitoring services Problogger uses. He very well could have written about all these services too, but I just found two sites in particular I had never heard about. I felt like a sleuth.

ClickTale.com: A site where you can record, watch and understand. The service looks amazing. Basically the hosted software records movements of mouse clicks then allows you to play back your own traffic history. I love the idea of it, but haven’t tried it out for any tests. I do remember Darrin talking about the heat map feature, which is also part of this service.

103Bees.com: This site analyzes search traffic to help you optimize your site. I’ve placed the code on my pages and will be monitoring how well it does. The service seems fairly good at what it does. I’m going to test it out for a few weeks, then write a little bit about the results.

It Pays to Look under the Hood
The exercise started out simple enough. I wanted to find out how my site’s speed measured up to other blogs. I found my site does serve up fairly well and I also found a few new tracking solutions. It’s just what I need — more stats!

Have you noticed an increase in my site’s load time?

A blog network can be a truly helpful tool to new blogs, so when Antonio Marques of Digital-Folders.com emailed me asking if I wanted to join his network I had to consider it. Many of you might not be familiar with Blog Networks just yet. They offer bloggers a way to connect to other blogs, both in content and in readership. The basic framework of any blog network revolves around helping each blog succeed.

The Digital-Folders network is a fairly new one, as compared to older, established networks like B5Media.com. Other than having links on the sidebar of other blogs back to my site, what benefit exists in joining a blog network? Can anyone join? I had these questions on my mind after Antonio’s initial email, so I asked him these questions and a few more. He’s graciously allowed me to post the responses to those questions. I’m still in the deciding mode, but I encourage those of you who want to experience the benefits of a blog network to check out Digital-Folders.com.

I would retain all rights to my blog, right?
Absolutely correct. We do not claim any rights on anything on the associated blogs. All content is owned by the authors and they can, at any time, break the association with us. It’s your blog and you steer it in any way you want. We may provide advice but again, it’s your blog.

The ad space on my site would be sold at 75% profit for me, correct?
Correct again. You’ll know for how much we are selling it and 75% of it is yours.

How much would estimate a site like my own would pull in for ad space?
This is probably the hardest question we face. It’s not easy to put a price tag on a space. We like to discuss this with the bloggers and know how much they would like to sell it for. Nonetheless, it’s always a fine balance: Too high and it won’t sell, too low and we’ll be loosing money. We like to start low and see what the response from advertisers is. The pricing is a progressive process, and prices can be easily changed to deal with changes in the growth of each site. For an estimate, you’ll have to tell me what spaces we are talking about and what the demographics for your site are.

Do I have any say so on who can advertise on my site?
As principle, we do not allow ads from suspicious sites or sites connected with anything illegal. We also steer away from gambling or adult sites. If you want to approve every advertiser, it’s possible to be done, or you can trust our editorial instincts. As for advertisers that we approach, we can guarantee that they will be relevant to your site and provide value to your visitors. And let’s face it, this is direct advertising: companies or sites usually don’t invest money on ad space that will not bring them some targeted visitors. But again, if you so wish, before putting an ad live we can contact you and ask your opinion on it.

Do you have quality standards you hope to meet with new blogs?

This question needs to be addressed differently for a blog integration (like yours) or for a blogger wanting to open a new blog with us.

In the first case, we have a “checklist” that every already existing blog needs to meet before either we approach the blogger or the blog is accepted. One of the main points is quality. We don’t mind if the blog is still small, but if the quality it shows looks promising for a steady growth (like yours), we will approach it.

or new blogs to be hosted by us, it’s a harder process since we have nothing to evaluate. On our application page for new blogs, we ask a brief description of what the blog will focus on. If we find the idea promising, we’ll take it. It’s risky since a blog is not only constructed by good ideas and it will probably require a good deal of tutoring to get it running.

In any case, both for integrated blogs and new blogs, we have an individualized training program where we discuss with the bloggers things that could be changed and/or improved to allow for a faster growth, so no blogger is alone on this ride with us.

Also, we try to regularly clean our list. What I mean with this is, if a blog drops in quality for an extended period of time and we can’t get the blogger to get back on it, we’ll probably drop it from our roll. Statistically, 95% of the new blogs around do not survive long. We try our best to reduce that “death rate” with our blogs, but if it simply can’t be brought back, we remove it from our inventory in order to maintain the quality level.

Thanks again, Antonio for answering my questions. I will be following up with Digital-Folders soon with an answer. In the meantime, what do you think, readers? Would you join a blog network? Do you think it would help your blog explode on the internet?