After a bunch of trial and error I think I have it down – at least for now. Making video blog posts that can be seen in iTunes and that play correctly in your blog takes a bit of setting up. However, once you have the framework, each individual posts takes only a few very easy steps to create.
Once you have podPress activated you need to go through a number of things to get your feed actually working. Check out this tutorial. Excellent wiki post about everything PodPress!
2) Uploading media
The first thing you want to do is upload your media. As long as your files are under 10mb, you can upload them using the Wordpress Upload feature right below the editor (where you type your blog text).
[If your file is larger than 10mb, you will need to use FTP. Gather the full path to your files using your FTP program instead Step 3.]
You will want to create two upload files for each video:
A) The actual video formatted for the iPod
B) A poster frame that visitors click to begin playing the video
While it is not required that you create this poster frame, it sure looks a lot better =) Formatting for the iPod allows your video to be seen on the iPhone/iPod touch and downloaded to all video iPods.
3) Send uploaded files to the editor
Why do you do this if podPress is going to create your podcast for you? Simple: you need the location of the files you uploaded. The name is not enough – you need the full path.
4) Copy to location of the files to podPress
Click the “Add Media File” button down below the editor and fill in the fields. I have only gotten the podcasts to work when I used the full internet address (http://yvod.com/etc…) This is the only reason to do step 3.
podPress does nothing but LINK to your uploaded media. It does not handle the media in anyway. That is the key. Use podPress to communicate with iTunes. It handles all the (not so complicated) code of formating your feed and making sure your new podcasts are published to the world. Anytime you fill in the podcasting fields below the editor and publish a post, the world will know about it.
5) Write some copy
Write the something about your video. If you want the video to show up in a specific place, simply put the following code where you want the video to show up:
[display_podcast]
(Note: this is optional. If you do not put this code in, your video will display at the bottom of your post.)
Break the Chains is revamping their site to include audio and video content. Deborah wants to create video podcasts to post on the site. Since I do not know a lot about how to create video podcasts, I figured I would jot down a few of my observations while I learn.
The Apple tutorial is good in that it is simple an uses available technology. You can create a video podcast with nothing more than your Mac with its built-in video camera and mic using Quicktime Pro to record your content. Simply “Export” your content to the iPod and save it to your website. What could be easier?
I like this link because it makes create the required XML file easy to understand. There is nothing scary about creating this RSS file. While it is not hard, it is a required step and a lot of people worry about it.
I do not like services like this. While they make the process “easy” they lock you in to their exclusive way of doing things that I feel is inferior to doing it yourself. I understand that for a lot of people, this is an acceptable trade-off, but I wish folks would see how easy it is to host your own podcasts (video, audio and other). Just get a uSite talk and away you go.
Over the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.
My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.
Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.
We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.
Most of us would prefer to base our voting decision on policy differences. However, the candidates’ goals are similar. They have all laid out detailed plans on everything from strengthening our middle class to investing in early childhood education. So qualities of leadership, character and judgment play a larger role than usual.
Senator Obama has demonstrated these qualities throughout his more than two decades of public service, not just in the United States Senate but in Illinois, where he helped turn around struggling communities, taught constitutional law and was an elected state official for eight years. And Senator Obama is showing the same qualities today. He has built a movement that is changing the face of politics in this country, and he has demonstrated a special gift for inspiring young people — known for a willingness to volunteer, but an aversion to politics — to become engaged in the political process.
I have spent the past five years working in the New York City public schools and have three teenage children of my own. There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.
Senator Obama is running a dignified and honest campaign. He has spoken eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and opened a window into his character in two compelling books. And when it comes to judgment, Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.
I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.
I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.
I’m a new soul I came to this strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take
But since I came here felt the joy and the fear
Finding myself making every possible mistake
la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la…
I’m a young soul in this very strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit about what is true and fake
But why all this hate? Try to communicate
Finding trust and love is not always easy to make
la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la…
This is a happy end
cause’ you don’t understand
everything you have done
why is everything so wrong
This is a happy end
come and give me your hand
I’ll take your far away
I’m a new soul I came to this strange world
hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take.
But since I came here felt the joy and the fear
finding myself making every possible mistake.
la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la…
Bio
“It’s a dream I almost gave up on along the way”, says Yael Naim about her first album released by Tôt ou Tard. Without meeting the multi-instrumentalist David Donatien, to whom she dedicated two years and who illuminated the artist with his talents as arranger and director, it’s true that this project would have been forgotten at the back of a cupboard. Blessed with an unsettlingly pure voice and an incredible agility at composition, the Israeli singer with her jet-black hair fumbled a long time before succeeding with this collection of ballads that meander through folk and pop, with an elegiac frugality and multi-coloured fantasy. If the creation of this record was long and painful, the birth of its author as an artistic personality seems even more miraculous today, in a domain where everything seems to have been already sung or played. To the point where with Yael Naim music that was once simply beautiful has now magically found a lost grace.
Born in 1978 in Paris, Yael spent a large part of her childhood in Ramat Hacharon, a small town not far from Tel Aviv. Her Tunisian parents went to live there when she was four years old. “I remember there was a little organ which I’d tap my fingers on all the time. My interest in the instrument was so obvious, one day I got home from school and there was a real piano in my bedroom.” Ten years of conservatory and classical piano lessons followed. “After I saw the film, Amadeus, there was only one thing I wanted to do and that was to write symphonies.” Her idyll with classical music quickly revealed another. “At home my father would play his Beatles records and that’s how I discovered Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road, aged 12. And also when I forgot my classical ambitions.”
Yael began composing songs which helped get over her timidity… With adolescence she discovered a voice and leant towards a vocal clarity by listening to Aretha Franklin. Aged 18 having come across a Joni Mitchell record she dared to push herself even further with her own lyrics. Music never left her and her curiosity never waned. In a jazz club in Tel Aviv she met Winston Marsalis’ musicians and performed some concerts with them. Even the two years of military service (which Israeli women are obliged to do) didn’t stop her musical journey and she managed to form a group called The Anti Collision who played in clubs around the country. “After all these years everything was a bit chaotic inside. My classical education, my love of pop, the jazz, the folk... I didn’t know how to bring it all together, but I knew I wanted to write songs.”
It was an invitation to a charity concert that brought her to Paris in 2000 and saw things really start rolling. During the show, she was noticed by producers and four days later she had signed a contract with EMI and had an album on the boil. Her name really began to circulate after she was spotted by director Elie Chouraqui who asked her to play the role of Miriam (Moses’ sister) in the Ten Commandments and then she was approached to do the original sound track for the film, Harrison’s Flowers... “I hesitated but I don’t regret having accepted because it was an amazing thing to live through for two and a half years.”
Her first album, In a Man’s Womb, recorded between Paris and Los Angeles was finally released in 2001. For her it was a failure, “A huge deception because I’d given everything up for it. I suddenly lost a lot of confidence in myself which really led me to question everything.” So the young woman with the golden voice was plunged into a period of disillusion concerning her record, the end of a relationship and a career ranging from jobs to survive (another musical, Gladiator) to edgier collaborations (the album Ready Made FC).
Then there was the meeting in 2004 with David Donatien who was accompanying a friend on stage they had in common. A West Indian drummer, David had spent the last 15 years working with an extraordinary variety of people from Bernard Lavilliers to the electro musician Junior Jack, from Wassis Diop to Malia. As changeable with instruments as he is with genres, he moves from traditional drum kits to electronic tools. David has always made a point of not stopping at just the one vocation of rhythm, but throws himself into the role of arranger too. His skill and imagination has literally made Yael’s musical universe bloom by giving a direction to her music and an aesthetic to her songs. Equally it was David who encouraged Yael to sing in Hebrew, something she had strictly denied herself up until now. Their complicity and complementary styles are such that now they prefer to present themselves as a group.
To begin with this album was meant to focus solely on guitar and vocals. But little by little Yael and David padded out the sonorous architecture and formed a team. Xavier Tribolet (drums), Laurent David (bass), Voed Nir (cello) and Julien Feltin (electric guitar) joined them as well as S.Husky Huskolds for the mix (Tom Waits, Fiona Apple, Me’Shell Ndegeocello).
The instrumentation is pretty minimalist here yet incredibly colourful with the participation of the brass section, the Mellotron, the cello and some programming. Recorded in the young woman’s flat in Paris the 13 songs contain a part of Yael happy (Endless Song of Happiness) and melancholic (Paris, Lonely) existence. Some of them, like Yashanti or Lachlom dive into dreams, others like Baboker bathe in the serenity found at the break of day. Shelcha looks at a love with no future. The most outrageous is of course the cover of Britney Spears’ Toxic.
Listening to these little marvels could possibly remind us of old friends like Tori Amos or Fiona Apple. Yet the ensemble isn’t witness to excessive borrowing or exaggerated sonorous marking, but quite the contrary revealing a sincerity and absolute musical clarity. In fact it is quite astonishing how something that sounds so familiar could seduce our ears with such a nude and original beauty. Perhaps it is due to the dominance of Hebrew, a language so rarely sung in this context, that comes across as universal as Cesaria Evora’s Portuguese Creole?
Or is it the simply the very freshness exhaled by the personality of this young woman who discovers in New Soul - sung in English with a contagious optimism – that she is “a new soul, in this foreign world, hoping to learn a little”? “It was when I was really young that I sincerely believed to be an old soul reincarnated and I could even say it gave me a sense of superiority over others. But then as I subsequently did everything the wrong way round I concluded that it was actually my first time on earth and that I should learn to be a more humble.”
On Far Far, she herself delivers this other perspective, that of a little girl who chases her dreams but who can only achieve them by accepting the “beautiful mess inside”. In short both her own personal history and that of this simply magical record.
I wake up every day thinking of how to make end this insanity. I know “opening up markets” or “creating a powerful central government” is not going to do it. These people have nothing. Less than nothing. They do not even have life. There must be a better way.
One day I will go there again with a way forward. I know the process involves getting rid of money and the concept of exchange. I know it involves people freely organizing, living where they choose ignoring both borders and tribal limits on movement. And I know one day we will agree to renounce violent conflict completely. What better place to begin than a land ravaged by war? What better place to find peace?
This post says it all. Even if nothing unseemly happened, confidence in the process is not there. If you believe in voting then you must believe in certification of voting results. Innocent until proven guilty when it comes to voting gets flipped on its head: not valid until confirmed.
We can not confirm that our elections are not being stolen.
“In a truly democratic election, the burden of proof is on the state to provide evidence of the election’s integrity.”