How the notPopular.com podcast is made

By Josh Highland in hardware, internet, Josh's Rambling, software, tutorials, wordpress

podcast_icon

Some of you blog reading people might know that I have a fairly well known podcast called the “notPop podcast”, that centers around music news and the activities of my site, notPopular.com. for almost 2 years now @xFLORIDAx and I have been churning these podcasts out and having a lot of fun doing it.

From time to time I get people emailing me asking how we record and put the podcast out onto the web. I’m going to be honest, it wasn’t easy to figure out, but we made it through. I’m going to tell you how we record our podcast, so that it might help you figure out how to do yours.

If you are un-familiar with my podcast, There is a minimum of 2 mics, but up to 8. We also play music and take listener calls.

The notPop podcast format is as follows:

  • intro music
  • welcome / introduction / catch up
  • featured band
  • news stories
  • throwback band
  • feedback from callers
  • ending statements
  • outro music
  • outro bonus clip

That might look like a lot of stuff to take on if you are un-familiar with recording audio on a computer. Don’t worry, I will walk you through it. (Disclaimer: I use Windows Vista for podcasting, but this will also work on Windows XP)

First off since we do have so many mics running at once, we need to capture all that audio at once. One solution is to just have one mic that everyone talks into. You can do that if you want your podcast to sound like crap. I don’t suggest it. Another way is to use a sound mixer board, and professional mics. That’s pricey and requires a lot of know how and fancy audio cards installed in your computer. I don’t suggest this method either. The best way I have found to get multiple mics working at the same time is USB headsets.

USB headsets are cheap and offer great sound quality. The real advantage is that each USB headset will act as their own sound input to the system so you have will have sound control over each device. I personally like to use the “Logitech Premium USB Headset 350”, you can get them cheap online, about $25 each.

350headset

Once you have them hooked up, windows will see them. Go to the control panel and go to recording devices. I like to set each mic to 30%. I have found that this is the best setting to prevent clipping. Clipping happens when a sound input is higher then can be recorded. when clipping occures, you lose out on the data trying to be recorded and you end up sounding like crap.

For recording software, I use Adobe Audition. It’s super powerful. Inside the application, you will see multiple time lines. I assign each time line to a input (remember that each USB mic is its own input!). I leave an open time line for sound clips and songs. Arm the tracks to record, press the record button and start talking into the mics. You should see the sound coming in.

adobeaudition

Once in a while we press the stop button and drag in an mp3 or wav file to be played. Once its in place, we set the timeline right after the clip and start recording again. We do this for the intro and exit music, along with the songs and listener calls we take.

For listener calls, I use skype with the skypeIn option. With sypeIn you get a phone number and a voicemail box. By default, you cant save the voicemails that people leave you in skype. I use a software package called PrettyMay to save the voice mails and calls as mp3 files. I use the PrettyMay Call Recorder for Skype, it costs $24 for a license with free upgrades for lifetime. After I save all the calls to mp3s, I can drag them into the time line in Adobe Audition, just like the songs we play.

Once all the audio is finished and complete in Adobe Audition, I export the raw WAV file by going to file->export audio. The export takes a while to complete.

After the WAV is exported, I import it into Audacity, and export it out as a 128kbps mp3 file. You need the LAME MP3 Encoder to export mp3s from audacity

audacity_mp3export

Once you have the mp3 exported, listen to it (or atleast spot check it)! You want to make sure your rad new podcast sounds good. This is the final product, the rest of the post will be on how to deliver it to the listeners.

A podcast is simple an entry in an RSS feed with a media file enclosures. I’m not going to go into details on how to do this, but Apple has a great page on how to get your podcast into iTunes.

notPopular.com is powered by WordPress and I use a wordpress plugin called BlubrryPowerPress to syndicate the podcast to the site and to iTunes.

itunes

That’s basically it! I love podcasting and have been doing it for several years now. If you have some questions, leave them in the comments below..

Manually reset your WordPress password

By Josh Highland in hacks, internet, MySQL, software, tutorials, windows, wordpress

lost-wordpress-password

It doesn’t matter what application your working with, losing your password is always a pain in the ass. Luckly if you are working with wordpress (man, I blog a lot about wordpress these days), on your server and you have access to the MySql database, resetting your password manually is a snap.

  • Login to your PhpMyAdmin
  • Select your WordPress database and click on the “SQL” button to open the SQL query window.

wordpress-phpmyadmin

  • Paste the following code in the window textarea. (Don’t forget to modify the password and username before executing it)

UPDATE ‘wp_users’ SET ‘user_pass’ = MD5(‘PASSWORD’) WHERE ‘user_login’ =’admin’;

That’s it! Your password has been reset, and you should be able to login to your wordpress admin area once again.


			



	

		
WordPress Security
		
By Josh Highland in software, tutorials, wordpress 
	

		
 
		
wordpress-lock


I love WordPress. Of all the blogging and web content management systems I have tried WordPress wins hands down. I’ve moved several of my clients sites and my personal sites to the WordPress platform over the last few months.


As a web developer with a checkered past, security is always a concern of mine when using an out of the box solution that I didn’t write.  I think that anyone who takes the time to develop a nice website would want to help protect it from those who would want to vandalize it.


WordPress is very stable and fairly secure (one of the benefits of open source software), but I have found a few places in the software that I beef up through a few simple steps that I believe everyone should take.


Security point 1: wp-config.php

wp-config.php is the key to the wordpress operation. This file hold usernames and passwords to your databases. Scary stuff if it fell into the wrong hands. By default this file is protected from direct web access because it has a .php extension, and doesn’t output anything. This is a common practice and is fairly secure. Suppose this, there is a problem with your php install of your web server, and instead of the .php file getting processed, it just gets served out and anyone who wanted to could download the passwords to your database. scary stuff! An easy way to fix this is through your .htaccess file.


open the .htaccess file in the root of your wordpress install, and add the following lines:


<FilesMatch ^wp-config.php$>
deny from all
</FilesMatch>


This will tell the web server to NEVER serve out the wp-config.php file. Sure its a long shot that your server would server this file out, but an ounce of prevention is better then a pound of trouble!


Security point 2: browsable plugins directory by default

Do this on your server, go to http://www.your-domain.com/wp-content/plugins/

did you see the plugins that you have installed? What if one of those plugins has a security hole in it? A hacker could lurk around for sites with an exploitable version of a plugin installed, and then have their way with your site. The solution to this is SO SIMPLE, I dont know what wordpress doesnt to this by default.


create a blank file named “index.html” and place it in the /plugins directory. Now try to navigate to http://www.your-domain.com/wp-content/plugins/

The plugins list should not show up, and would-be-hackers have no way of knowing all the plugins you have installed. A simple and elegant solution.


Conclusion:

wordpress is a great piece of software and with age, it will get more secure and more stable. The community of wordpress users are the people who make wordpress truly powerful. As I find things that I believe need changed, I will continue to blog about them, and submit changes to the wordpress project.

			



	

		
Modifying MimboPro to Add Paged Navigation To Category Pages
		
By Josh Highland in hacks, internet, php, tutorials, web 2.0, wordpress 
	

		
 
		


Recently I have been doing a lot of work with WordPress. I love WordPress. one of the things I like most about WordPress is the plugins and themes.


I recently bought a copy of the MimboPro theme. Mimbo is clean and very professional. More of a CMS theme then a blogging theme, prefect for what I want to use it for.


As I dug into MimboPro and WordPress, I realized something strange, the MimboPro theme doesn’t support paging in a category view. What this means is EVERY SINGLE post you make is shown on one page. If you have a very active site, like the one I’m working on, this quickly gets out of hand. Look at this image and you will see what I mean (click for full version).




One of the reasons I like MimboPro was the support that the authors of the theme offer. I headed over to their message forums and found other people like me asking for the Additon of Paged Navigation To Category Pages. The original post was 8 months ago, and no one had resolved anything. I made a post to the MimboPro authors only to be told that there is going to be a new theme that will handle this and it will be available at a deep discount to MimboPro owner. This upset me a bit, so taking matters into my own hand, I fixed what Mimbo wont, and I am handing out my own patch to solve this issue. Below are the instructions to hack your own files, or you can just download my zip file with the pre-hacked files.


Pre-Hacked Files:

Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip


DIY INSTRUCTIONS (click images for full sizes):


    

  1. Save a copy of your current categories.php and styles.css files inside of the MimboPro theme directory to a safe location
    2. 

  2. Open up categories.php inside of the MimboPro theme directory, and find line 17
    

    3. 

  3. Comment line 17 with a double back slash (//)
    

    4. 

  4. Go to line 87 of category.php and add the following code
    

    5. 

  5. Save and close category.php
    6. 

  6. Open up style.css inside of the MimboPro theme directory
    7. 

  7. Add the following CSS code to the bottom of the file (should be close to line 852)
    

    8. 

  8. Save styles.css
    9. 

  9. Upload categories.php and styles.css to the MimboPro theme directory on your server
    10. 

  10. Everything should be working. Here is what my wordpress running MimboPro looks like
    

    11. 



That’s it! MimboPro will now have paging in all of the categories. The next and previous links will only show up when you have enough posts. The WordPress default is 10 posts. You can edit the number of posts by going to change the number of posts to show on a category page, go into to the admin and under “setting” > “reading” you will find the option, as highlighted here.




If you had any problem reading the code in the image files, download the zip files with the pre-hacked files in them.


Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip


If you have any further questions, please post them in the comment.



			



	

		
WordPress iPhone app
		
By Josh Highland in hardware, internet, iPhone, Josh's Rambling, software, web 2.0, wordpress 
	

		
 
		
I love wordpress as a blogging platform an I love the iPhone as a mobile computing solution. Yesterday I saw that there was a wordpress app avaliable for the iPhone, so I had to try it out.


This is a post from the wordpress app, and so far it’s easy to use. I don’t know how much milage I will get out of this app, I tend to blog from home and use Twitter on the run. Who knows, this app might change that!


Let’s see how the image attachment feature works. This is me, right now in my office. 


photo