Sphinx

So it turns out that the best way to revive the blog viewing statistics and get some discussion going, at least temporarily, is a post on the decline of blogging and the absence of discussion… Thanks to everyone who read and commented; yes, the numbers are sliding back to their old level already, but it’s good to know that there are people out there still committed to this genre (and I still maintain that it’s a distinctive genre, certainly from the perspective of a writer, whatever @rogueclassicist thinks…). In the meantime…

In the meantime, I try to work out why WordPress won’t let me embed an embeddable player… In the interim, this will have to do:

Yes, prompted by some of the suggestions on here and on the Twitter, I have moved into podcasting. Or at least into a different sort of podcasting. Some readers might vaguely recall that I’ve posted music-related podcasts in the past, which does mean that I already have some grasp of the technology (not the linking to iTunes, though; still working on that) and already own a decent microphone. The bad news is that the wish to link to iTunes and build a proper audience means I’ve had to delete the old music podcasts before the copyright police come a-knocking; I still have copies, if anyone would like one…

This is very much a work in progress; I had done some research for this episode about a year ago, when I first wondered about getting into vlogging and then never got round to learning how to use the technology, so it is likely to take a month to find time to research each future episode – but there is certainly enough material to keep me going for a while. I also need to work out cat-related strategies; the occasional interruptions, when Olga jumped into a cardboard box on the table and then somehow pushed herself off or when Hector started attacking the cat flap, were manageable (I guess I could have edited them out altogether) – but I really hadn’t realised how much of the episode features the jingling of collar bells in the background…

Update: it turns out that wordpress.com doesn’t support the embeddable player. Harrumph.