Interview with David Spark...

No, not my Mac Roundtable buddy David Sparks (MacSparky) but another David Spark, the Davis Spark who is publishing a series about "Making Money from Podcasting"

The series is being published at the Technologiser website but I understand it's part of a larger project.

I had a chance to chat with David for 10 or 15 minutes last week via Skype and the interview and a write up is now available over at the website. As it's part of a series, you'll find some other interesting content covering the handful of podcasters who have managed to break the mould and actually make a living doing the thing they love.

One particular interview gives me immense satisfaction and that's the one from Israel Hyman, who runs the successful Izzy Video podcast and has also gone full time. I met up with Izzy a couple of times at the New Media Expo (as it was) and gave him some advice and background on how I built up ScreenCastsOnline. He was kind enough to mention this in his interview as one of the factors in "going it alone". It's so good to see he's been able to replicate the success I've had using the same model.

If you're at Blogworld next month Izzy, I'll let you buy me a beer :-)

New Plex Plugin...

If you're a regular follower of ScreenCastsOnline you may remember I covered a fantastic free application called Plex, back in episode SCO0201 - Mac mini Media Center - Part 2 - Plex This is an amazing application that turns your Mac into a media center and whilst optimised for large screen viewing, is just as great to run on your desktop or laptop. I've adopted Plex as the main application for my Mac mini media center.

The application supports a plugin architecture and when I did the original show, I put some feelers out via Twitter to see if anyone could help me put together a plugin for ScreenCastsOnline. To my surprise, I received back an email from James Clarke, one of the Plex developers who kindly offered to write the plugin for me.

Result!

Of course, the plugin was intended for the free and open shows available on the free feeds, but it was a terrific boon and quite a delight to see ScreenCastsOnline in there with the rest of the plugins.

I checked with James how easy it would be to develop a plugin for the members shows, baring in mind, these are protected and require a username and password to authenticate to access the content. He said he'd have a think about it and set about testing some possible approaches.

To cut a long story short, James has now delivered a version of the Plex plugin that supports both the free feed and the members feed. He's written a super front end to allow valid ScreenCastsOnline Extra members to sign in via Plex and stream the shows. The plugin accesses the standard RSS feeds so it will present a separate list of shows for each year, and will be updated each week when I publish a new show.

Wonderful!

He even took it further by adding in a option to toggle either HD or ED versions of the show to help out members with limited bandwidth. I know a lot of members have adopted Plex following the original ScreenCastsOnline show and this new option will be greatly appreciated.

I'm sure James won't mind me extending one more time, a huge thank you for all his efforts and I truly appreciate his patience and tenacity in bringing this to fruition.

If you're an existing Plex user, you can either install or upgrade the updated plugin from the Plex App store. This weeks members show contains a small screencast on installing and configuring the plugin.

If you've not checked out Plex, I can't recommend it highly enough - check out the free ScreenCastsOnline show SCO0201 - Mac mini Media Center - Part 2 - Plex

Click to read more ...

Yes, I know you're excited but...

Now as you know, I'm as big a fan of Apple and OSX as most of the readers of my blog, but I just want to try and set expectations a bit with the upcoming launch of Snow Leopard on Friday.

Leopard is a stellar operating system and Snow Leopard will make it even more stellar, but it's a bit like an iceberg, in that most of the changes are below the waterline. We'll all benefit significantly from these new changes over time as more and more developers re-engineer their applications to take advantage of the new core features.

But it's going to take time.

The cosmetic changes you'll see on Friday will be relatively low key but the intention always was evolutionary not revolutionary.

So what I'm saying is don't expect to be initially blown away on Friday when you boot into Snow Leopard, it will all seem very familiar. However, As you explore, you'll discover lots of really neat but very subtle changes throughout the OS, some not very obvious, some you'd probably not realise unless you had them pointed out to you.

Over the next few weeks, I'll do a couple of ScreenCastsOnline shows covering Snow Leopard, starting this week with a run through of the installation options and possibly some of the more obvious features. I'll follow up next week with a look at some of the subtle changes in Snow Leopard and how to get the most of it.

Just don't expect to have your socks blown off on Friday, Snow Leopard will remove them gently and carefully over the next few weeks!

Click to read more ...

Time for a re-evaluation...

Well just back from my first trip to my local leisure club following the MacMania09 Asia trip. It's been three weeks since I got back, and it's taken me that long to feel well enough to subject myself to some swimming and a nice hot sauna.

So I suppose, I'm back into the old routine.

However, I think I need to make some re-adjustments.

Since starting ScreenCastsOnline, I've been balancing the weekly shows with some external production work, mainly custom screencasts for clients. This was an absolute godsend in the early days, as it went a long way to keep our head above water, whilst I built up the ScreenCastsOnline audience. It's taken the best part of four years to build up ScreenCastsOnline to the level that it is now and the need for the external jobs to help pay the mortgage is not as necessary as it was in the early days.

ScreenCastsOnline is still mainly a one man show, I do all the technical and creative stuff, although my wife is getting more involved in the admin side of things. However, the one resource that is in limited supply, being such a small operation, is time.

The weekly show probably takes up the best part of a half to a third of the week, admin and maintenance related activities, another day or two and that's most of the week gone.

The problem is, as any self employed person will tell you, it's so hard to say no to work.

An even bigger problem is the time it takes to do the commissioned stuff. You would not believe how much work and effort that can go into a scripted three minute screencast for a client. I've done loads of them and I still don't believe it!

The result of this is that I feel that ScreenCastsOnline takes a back seat some weeks and that just doesn't sit well with me. It also means I have no spare time for my pet projects or just free time to kick back and enjoy the fruits of my labour.

So come September, I've decided to pretty much say no to all* requests for custom screencasts and concentrate more on ScreenCastsOnline.

*All? Look, I'm not completely crazy. If someone needs a screencast and is prepared to pay a premium for it, I'd be daft to say no. Also, if a prestigious project turns up that will increase the visibility of ScreenCastsOnline then again, I'm not going to turn them away. I'm just saying, I'm going to be highly selective in what I take on.

So if that goes to plan, I'd like to take some time to build on the current success of ScreenCastsOnline and make it an even better resource for members and non-members alike.

I'd like time to focus on such issues as:

• Making the huge amount of content on the ScreenCastsOnline archive more accessible
• Making search easier
• Revamping the ScreenCastsOnline website
• Enhancing the Membership experience
• Promoting and marketing ScreenCastsOnline more effectively
• Streamlining and automating the production process
  
• Ramping up show production to produce more shows in advance
  
• Giving myself some time to work on some other ideas I have
  

Of course, the other option would be to expand ScreenCastsOnline with some extra people but realistically, I don't really want to go down that route. I really just want ScreenCastsOnline to remain small but perfectly formed!

We'll see how it goes come September.

PS I'm going to try and restart my regular blogging activities too, perhaps not everyday but a lot more frequent.

Click to read more ...

The Perils of Re-Tweeting!

Ahem!

I re-tweeted a tweet yesterday, all to do with Microsoft plans of opening retail stores which for all intents and purposes, resemble Apple stores. No big deal as I re-tweet a lot of tweets if I find them interesting. I always give attribution, and wherever possible, I try not to edit the tweet, unless I need to reduce it to less than 140 characters.

All well and good.

Except, the tweet yesterday included a fairly common expletive.

I pondered about editing it out, but in the end, I re-tweeted in it's entirety. In hindsight, perhaps I should have masked the expletive.

I've had no negative feedback at all via Twitter, and never thought anymore about it. Until that is, a few hours ago when a relative of mine expressed surprise at the language I'd used in the tweet, which he thought was very untypical of me (perhaps he hasn't been around me when I'm trying my best at DIY).

The bottom line was that he'd mistakenly thought the tweet (and the language) was mine and was unfamiliar with the concept of the re-tweet. In case you're unsure, if you see a tweet that starts:

RT @username:

This means that I'm reposting or re-tweeting (RT) a tweet from @username to share amongst my followers (who may not follow the original poster)

I wonder how many more people also think I've started to develop a potty mouth?

I haven't, honest!

Click to read more ...