quite | Croncast - From Cool to Cul De Sac

duvel high gravity

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:14:09 -0500

i put away two of these on an empty stomach. can you say instantly slurred speech? they were quite tasty.

Tags: slurred speech quite tasty instantly

she also says . . .

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:08:59 -0500

that this one is good but not quite as good as the gravel road.

Tags: road gravel quite

waffle, waffle, pancake, fork with cream cheese

Sat, 31 May 2008 08:58:09 -0500

the man woke up early, snuck the toaster into the basement with a stash of frozen waffles, pancakes, bagels and cream cheese.

there is nothing quite like the desires of a small child to become a basement sous chef.

when asked about cream cheese on the fork, said chef replied, "dad, it was necessary to taste it with waffles."

bravo, young man.

Tags: cheese cream chef basement waffles

two lanes wide, the names

Mon, 26 May 2008 16:31:48 -0500

the crowd got hushed quite a bit when they saw this banner coming down the street when they realized what it was.

the banner has the names of every soldier killed to date in the current iraq war. the stunning part is that the names are written very small.

it had a great impact. people were commenting about how big the banner was.

no one clapped when this one went by.

i got choked up and am again typing this up.

Tags: operation iraqi freedom operation enduring freedom names written small

elliot didn't get any stitches. but how about some space age metal!

Thu, 08 May 2008 16:43:58 -0500

as elliot blazes new medical treatments for the family, we are left with nothing to say, but he was lucky to have caught the gardening hoe on the head. better the top of his dome than an ear or finger finding their way under it.

he was quite upset when it happened, to be expected, but his little friend that was wielding the hoe was crying even harder. i think the blood freaked him out the most as he refused to come into the house.

as a parent, this situation didn't bother betsy or me that much given his past medical history.

Tags: medical elliot hoe harder crying

Season 20 Ep 6: Yesterday was tax day?

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:03:01 -0500

Croncast - 2008-04-16.mp3
Show: #481
Length: 25:10
Size: 17.3 mb
Format: mp3

Show us some love and leave us a review at iTunes

Special note: Betsy and Jeanie are having a meetup in San Francisco May 21, 2007 at House of Shields 39 New Montgomery St., Time: 6:30 p.m., stop and have a drink or two!

Sorry for the late show . . . long day. Now I gotta put the kids to bed.

Enjoy the show!

Updated show notes
I think the people know what year it is
I am your enabler, Kris
Your workaholism is what i enable
The day after tax day
Didn't you see me freaking out?
Not really . . . you kept saying we have to file an extension
Taxes should be due on a Friday
Not a Tuesday
It should be a floating holiday?
Yes
This is the first year in 3 years we don't owe the IRS any money
I will never understand the IRS ever
Co-owner of a company that lost quite a bit of money
Listen, Rush Limbaugh
How can my company lose money and the feds give me money back?
The tax code is crazy
The other fabulous thing today
It felt like a tele-novela
I got to Goodwill and they were throwing someone out
It was the first time ever
He is the reason we can't pick off carts
I walked up to the china
It was sparkling at me
Get the order and buy service for 12
$20 a plate and $12 for the salad plates
Well, you weren't tossed out
Who would be pulling in as I leave?
Another Replacements.com seller
When did this lady show up?
She is a new Goodwill character
I thought this was just the Russian chick
No, she is diminutive
You're a junk consultant
I can tell you when I am 13

Tags: iphone att Betsy Smith Croncast Kris Smith

Mad Crazy Static

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:50:28 -0500

Took the kids to breakfast and then the riverwalk this morning.

Maggie wanted to see the ducks and Elliot wanted the park. Got them to agree that both were good.

I do have to say that it is quite a disappointment that the busiest portion of the riverwalk with be under construction for the entire summer.

I'm not really sure what the city parks people were thinking with this. It is going to hurt the businesses that are in that area as well as the amount of people that come to festivals that are held in that exact spot.

And since I have my gripe on, it also appears that for the remainder of the riverwalk they have removed about a third of the trees and nearly all of the other foliage that lines the banks of the river. Elliot pointed out that this year it looks "gross" and "dirty". Just blows my mind that a city would muck up their prime summer attraction.

Tags: naperville riverwalk summer rennovations 2008

Real Wooden Lawman

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:51:34 -0500

This awesome wooden, I guess you call it a statue, was keeping an eye on the collectibles aisle at the resale shop. Where else do you think we would spend a day with Betsy?

I got quite a few good shots of stuff from there and from my father-in-law's house.

To see the rest of the shots click on the wooden lawman above and look for the set called 'Easter Resale 20080323'.

Hoppy Easter!

Tags: wooden resale shots easter lawman

Update on Betsy's hand

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:27:24 -0500

Thank you to everyone for the kind words.

I wanted to give you guys and update on Betsy's hand, or meat hook, as I was calling it yesterday.

She's doing quite a bit better today after a tetanus shot, an iv bag full of anibiotics, other medication and some giant pills. The redness has subsided but she is still pretty sore and having some pain. Which is to be expected I suppose after such a benign attack. Right?

She'll be heading back to the doctor today to have it looked at again.

Thanks again.

Tags: meat hook dog bite infection emergency room

It took us a long time to get here

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:59:48 -0600

For over 3 years we worked hard to produce a show that we are proud of. In that time you have become friends with us even if we have never met face to face. I feel comfortable sharing with you.

Betsy and I are swamped right now with all the changes in our life. It has been a very hectic last few weeks. I leave tomorrow for a six day business trip. This trip has taken quite a bit of coordination and as I type this there is more that needs to be done.

For the next week to two weeks the shows will probably be sporadic. I will try to release a show on schedule during this time on MWF's. Some might be new and others will be best of clips that we have picked out.

Back to the beginning of this post. We don't want to lose your support and friendship. This is simply a tough time for us to get time to produce shows. Once the dust settles we'll be back on schedule. Plus, we'll have a couple weeks of show prep all built up.

Tags: Croncast Kris Smith Betsy Smith funniest podcast

Art Glass Shade

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:56:56 -0600

I like light quite a bit. So much so I took this photo this morning.

Betsy picked up the art glass shade above at Goodwill over the weekend for $.50.

It looks great in the kitchen and it fit the IKEA light fixture perfectly.

I need to ask her if she was talking to the Secret for that to happen. Because I highly doubt the original company was thinking about Swedish designed Chinese manufactured suburban light fixtures.

Tags: art glass light shade art folk art

Interviewed by Podcast Free America

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:59:00 -0600

Ryan Irelan of Podcast Free America has started a new series of "interviews with podcasters and new media producers about the stuff they do to make their podcasts great."

Ryan punched my ticket over the weekend and released the interview yesterday, "Inside Look: Kris Smith of Croncast".

We talked a little about the show and its origins, gear and quite a bit about RSS. I can't get enough of the RSS talk.

Look for some more interviews of other long-time podcasters in the future from PFA.

Thanks to Ryan for letting me ramble on!

Tags: PreSonus Sony Sound Forge Ryan Irelan Podcast Free America RSS

Twitter background guidelines

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:21:12 -0600

Ever wanted to make an interesting Twitter background? Here's how I did it.

Side note: This post comes to you straight from an email reply to fellow long-time podcaster Michael Geoghegan in regards to my Twitter background.

Also of note, this layout works best on higher res monitor settings. I imagine that most active Twitter users that are going to be viewing the site as opposed to sms or mobile versions are on high res settings. That said, let's roll.

Creating your background
-----------------------------

File Dimensions: 2048 px by 1707 px (no clue why i used these dimensions but I am sure I knew what I was doing at the time)
Branding Dimensions: 80 px by 587 px
Coordinates: X=20, Y=14
Horizontal position: 20 px from the left (give yourself some padding)
Vertical position: 14 px from the top (will line up your graphic with the top of the twitter logo. our eyes like symmetry) File size and type according to Twitter: "Images must be smaller than 800k. GIF, JPG, PNG."

Aesthetics
------------

Color palette: Pick colors that match that with default Twitter stylesheet colors. If they contrast too much follow the Change Background directions above and change the colors for Text, Name, Link, Sidebar fill and Sidebar border as needed.
Recommendation: Choose colors that work with the default and save yourself the headache of matching the CSS to your image. Follow Twitter's lead.

Uploading your background
------------------------------

Change Default Background: Login and click 'Settings' >> click 'Design' >> Select 'Use my custom style below' radio button >> Upload your image

It took me quite a bit of time to get a background image that I was happy with. There was a lot of editing and uploading again, and again until I got it right. I would suspect if you're like me your experience will be much the same. So have patience when getting it just right. And remember that you are working within someone else's website and can't control all the features.

Here's my background at work - http://twitter.com/croncast. And here's a link to the background all by itself if you want to use it as a guide.

Tags: template size twitter background Michael Geoghegan twitter

Pepsi Super Bowl Commercial Bob's House

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:42:22 -0600

Tim gets it right in his post "The Stuff Super Bowl Ads Are Made Of" when he says,

It truly has the stuff that Super Bowl Ads are Made of and looks like it will be one of the most talk about ad campaigns of this Super Bowl Season.

Wanna see it?

As Tim mentions in his post there is quite a back story here of how this commercial came about. It was originally produced by a few PepsiCo employees that are part of the EnAble group. Their version wasn't very Hollywood but very effective as a treatment or proof of concept because the story is told so well.

Look for some more buzz and talk in the next few weeks about this commercial as well as follow up videos.

How would I know? I mentioned on a podcast that I had a consulting gig that changed focus, right? Well, the team that is working this inside Pepsi and the digital team at a NYC agency are at the top of their game and will give this campaign legs beyond this one ad.

Tags: deaf sign language joke EnAble PepsiCo Super Bowl

What good are 3 hits from Google search results?

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:56:11 -0600

I can tell you. It all depends on what people are searching for.

Painfully obvious, right?

Well, not so much when someone searches at Google for intitle:"chocolate" ext:rss. The odds are astronomically high that even chocolate experts weren't even returned as results. See for yourself.

So what does this mean? It means that someone searched Google for a RSS feed (ext:rss) with the word chocolate in the title (intitle:"chocolate").

Yes, the search is more advanced than a keyword or phrase based search but that isn't my full point. The reason that it matters is that not only did this individual search for chocolate but also culture and abba. Not quite sure what it says about the person searching for those topics . . .

So for me, these three hits matter. They are three more than I would have normally received for those topics and a chance for me to get them to possibly subscribe to those feeds, subscribe to my podcast, click an ad (yes, I like money) or get my brand in front of them.

I am able to do this with keyword feeds that I create dynamically from posts that get the same SEO treatment that a normal webpage would get.

The other plus for this type of search is the fact that they return so few results and Croncast happens to be ranked #1 for most of them including searches like, say . . . "CNN" or "Micorsoft" or "iTunes".

I've had conversations with a friend, Rick Klau, about RSS feeds being indexed in Google search results. Most of those discussions focused on my saying that feeds should show up in search results and Rick saying that they shouldn't.

My stance is that some people, like myself, benefit from these results the same way that we benefit from a normal click through to our sites. I am able to do this by checking where the individual who clicked through is coming from and displaying a web page instead of the RSS with the exact same data that was in the feed.

But I don't stop there. I also make sure to let the user know how they got to the page and that they can now subscribe to that feed. It's a soft landing for what traditionally has been a hard look at XML or ugly feed displays in browsers. Which is where you will end up with 99.9 out of 100 feeds if you click through them when returned in a search.

What is Rick's position? If 99.9 are bad then they should be removed. For the time being I will agree that he is right. But that doesn't mean that this is the way it always has to be.

A couple of things could change this:

1) The uptake of RSS since IE7 and and FireFox now display their own XSLT to prettify the XML. Sort of like FeedBurner does.
2) Publishers add their own XSLT for their feeds
3) Publishers using blogs, most of which are dynamically generated, are written with code that can check for referers like Goolge, Live and Yahoo and redirect the user to a page that has the same content as the feed
4) My favorite. Google could create their own XSLT document that loads the feed into it.

Maybe that was more than a couple but I believe there are a lot of ways to welcome feeds into indexed search results beyond having to type in a search like intitle:"Google" ext:rss.

By the way, I'm not number one on this one Google is with it's YouTube property.

Next up, how to create RSS feeds with keywords in the title, how to get the .rss extension added to your feeds and landing pages for feeds.

Tags: RSS search page rank Google search RSS XSLT FeedBurner

Hulu is here (for late, late beta testers)

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:12:43 -0600

Which of course means me! Most of the bugs have probably been worked out of Hulu but I am excited, nonetheless, to have received my temporary login and password tonight. Why? Gems like this baby from 1983.

They got new episodes of shows like Heroes and The Office from last week but A-Team episodes are a prize.

In the first five minutes of using Hulu I like it about 99x better than Joost. I would kick it up to 100x they had a premium service that would let me download the videos. But from what I read in the Terms of Use item #4 that hasn't been ruled out.

Without downloads comparing this to iTunes would be like comparing Apples (oh, I kill me) and oranges. At this point I'm not quite sure that Hulu attempting to be iTunes. Let me stress, at this point. Since NBC pulled Heroes from iTunes they have to be missing that revenue.

Signs that making I'll be making this comparison in the future: in the playlist section of the site an RSS feed is created for the shows I add to my playlist and the portability of the video via Flash Player embed. It wouldn't surprise me if client side software is on the way soon.

The real downers for me right now are site nav, downloading and no Mad TV episodes. I'll post back in a couple days about this but I am pretty sure that I will be sharing more videos before that.

Tags: A-Team The Office Hulu hulu no downloads MadTV

Think differently about RSS and its uses

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:39:03 -0600

Over the weekend, as some of you may of you noticed, I live photo blogged my Saturday afternoon date with Betsy and our trip to Goodwill. For me it was a time to watch Betsy as she navigated her adopted habitat and to see her operate in a way that is far from the norm in our everyday lives.

I knew this was going to be an interesting experience. Why not share it in as many ways as possible (distribution to: Flickr, Twitter, blog and RSS) with as many people as possible? One input with multiple outputs across the various Croncast audiences.

Making it happen is a lot easier than you think with email and RSS.

First. it is the camera phone that takes decent photos. Second, is the phones ability to send email with photo attachments. Third, is a place to email the photos that has an RSS feed or other API connectivity to other applications. Tons of sites like Flickr, Seesmic and Tumblr offer these and can even do some of the distribution for you. Get these three things in place and sharing your experiences in near real-time has never been easier.

Currently, it does take a little more skill to distribute the photos to Twitter. However, if you get creative you can breathe life into photos that wouldn't normally have existed after it was consumed/viewed in a photo sharing site or through an RSS reader. It is worth the effort to figure this out, it's the next stage of content distribution online.

How do I know? Google Reader shared feeds are the perfect example. Typically once someone reads a post in their reader it has reached the end of the line. But if someone shares it with Google Reader it then gets added to the individual users shared RSS feed and resyndicated. A new life for that content. The same goes for photos that end up in Flickr or a Flickr RSS feed.

In my case, live photo blogging and my ability to cast a wider net wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the Flickr RSS feed from my account. It is the magic API that feeds (pun intended) the river of resyndication that allows me to give that new life to our content.

Here's how it goes down:

1. Upload photo from phone to Flickr with subject line used as image title
2. In the body under the photo begin with an asterisk (*) if I want the photo, title and description to be a blog post also
3. In the body under the photo begin with a carat (^) if I want the title and a link to be a tweet
4. Add both asterisk and carat (*^) for blog and twitter
5. A PHP script grabs the Flickr RSS feed and reads it for asterisks and carats every two minutes and sends the photo, title and description where it needs to go
6. If it goes to the blog the title and description will be run through a keyword generations script
7. If it goes to Twitter only the title is sent and a shortened url is created to link to the photo

What all of this does is allow me to create multiple channels of distribution that can reach the different audiences that follow us. There is a bit of overlap with multiple audience members subscribed to the same services but quite a few are not. We have the Twitter audience, the blog audience, the flickr audience and the RSS audience. We also have our podcast audience but they are not really a part of this type of delivery

Summary: Look for ways to utilize sites like Flickr as a content management portal, if even from your mobile phone, to cast a wider net across your network. Work to find that one point of contact that has the lowest threshold for allowing you to get your media and thoughts online with the ability to resyndicate your content without having to lift a finger. Well, too many fingers. And make sure that it has an RSS feed!

Tags: live photo blogging RSS as API flickr twitter seesmic tumblr

Make links with PHP from plain text

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 10:15:20 -0600

A couple of months ago I needed some PHP code to create links from plain text.

It took a while to find the right stuff but what I found was a script that needed quite a bit of work.

The fruit of my labor was this function that will take plain text URLs like http://www.croncast.com and turn them into http://www.croncast.com.

To use this function:

1. Take your copy, say $copy = "Lorem ipsum http://www.croncast.com"; and feed it to the function like so, echo makeURL($copy)
2. Output would be "Lorem ipsum http://www.croncast.com"

Tags: link from url create links make url PHP plain text to link