A few years ago my son John and I started an audio podcast called Bad Metaphor where we talked about technology and growing up and any other things that John was interested in. But we procrastinated and while John kept working on different themes and came up with topics, I never got around to actually recording more of them.
The site lapsed (it was built using Typo) and I stopped updating it. But in the new year I resolved to start it up again and I dusted off the site and now Bad Metaphor Episode 10: Procrastination is out in the world. The archives are also available, so now it’s all up and running and we will hopefully be able to keep up with a regular publication schedule and rebuild our audience. In the whole process I found that I really love WordPress (it was ridiculously simple to set up, so now I have two sites running two separate installations of WP), but that setting up an audio podcast now seems to be more complicated than video. The hosting provider I used before isn’t doing it any more and there aren’t a lot of free places to host audio files (with one very notable exception). The files are all hosted in the Internet Archive, which is faster than it was a few years ago and it’s where I like to put stuff to share.Everything is up and working now and we’re even listed again in the iTunes directory (just search for “Bad Metaphor” to find us there). I’m using FeedBurner to keep track of stats and to provide the podcast-friendly feed and it seems to be working ok. I did try to use one of the podcast WordPress plugins, but that seemed to make it all more complicated that I thought it would be.
The most challenging part is behind us now as we’ve started recording and the infrastructure is all in place, so now we just need to fill that space. At some point there may be some video, but I’m a fan of audio and there is something nice about sitting down and talking about stuff. The podcast now is recorded with my nifty Zoom H2 Handy recorder and I’ve been editing it with the newest version of Soundtrack Pro, which is very good after I figured a few things out with it.
At the heart of all of this is storytelling and I’m very glad that I can tell stories with my son. He provides music ideas and interesting conversation and I assemble and polish it. A few weeks ago he was listening to the old podcasts and finding out a bit about his past self. It’s a lot of fun to see and hear this.