Category: Podcasting

4000 and climbing

Two weeks ago I posted about hitting the 3000 mark for the number of downloads of Missionary Talks. Today we crossed 4000!

This has been helped by at least 2 things. The mission team I was with last week was made up of 20+ college age young people. They got home on Monday and started downloading the show I think. Then I had recorded a One Minute How To several weeks ago. I suspect that George’s podcast is quite popular. My episode went out on Monday as well. I have not heard it yet. I hope to get to it early next week.

Those two events caused me to average more than 100 downloads a day for the last 6 days. Normally I will see about 30 a day. This is great. I hope to keep these new listeners. That will require me getting on the ball and getting another show out. I just did not have the time that I had hoped I would to edit the recordings I have made.

I should be back on track in a few days.

I’m sinking!

I have commented a couple of times recently in other blogs and in the podcast that I released this morning about how that digg has brought me pretty good traffic numbers. This has been due, I think, to the fact that I was on page 2 of the religion category for a while and then dropped back to page 3. Today I fell into page 4! Yikes!

The way digg’s system works is that anyone digging the podcast (or story) has to be an active member of digg for their “digg” to count. To be active means that you dugg any story within the last 2 weeks. I think if you comment on the site you also keep your active status.

Though I have had 26 different diggs through the 3 month life span of the service, only 13 of those are currently active.

Use this as a reminder that any show or story that you have dugg in the past will lose their numbers if you don’t use the site. But as soon as you digg any story or podcast, then all your diggs return and those who you dugg will get their diggs back. Don’t just do it for me, do it for someone you love!

Missionary Talks 20: Garvin Dykes

Garvin Dykes is a friend of ours whom we met while still in our previous ministry at the Bill Rice Ranch. When we left the Ranch and started looking for information about having our church act as our “missions agency” we turned to Bro. Garvin for advice. He helped us tremendously and, over time, we decided to use Baptist International Outreach as a clearing house for our funds and legal paperwork (in missionary speak that means they keep us out of trouble with the IRS).

We knew several weeks back that Bro. Dykes would be in the area and also knew that we were going to get to have a meal with him. What we did not know is that we were able to snatch him away from his other responsibilities for a few hours.

I dragged him off to a coffee shop and recorded this interview…I won’t make that mistake again! What a horrible noisy place. I got them to turn down the music after we had been recording for a little bit, but the first part is still quite noisy. After we finished up the interview we stepped outside and it was so nice and quiet out there. Had we set up our interview out there we would only have had road noise to deal with on occasion. The music was blasting the whole time inside.

I wanted to do the interview in a place that had some background noise. Doing any recording during the day at my house is sketchy. It is hard to keep things quiet with all the outside noise and 2 kids. By recording in a “sound rich” environment, I figured it would be easier to excuse the occasional noise. I got well more than I bargained for.

Check out the show. Let me know what you think. As far as interesting content, this is one of the best episodes in my opinion. We did not talk about him or his ministry. We talked about a three month trip to Africa and what he was able to do there.

No podcast this week

Wow, only 3 weeks into the new podcast and I miss a week. Well, as you will find out, this podcast is for fun and not high on the priority list.

I have recorded it twice and both had serious problems. Too serious to overcome. The first was due to my recording location and the second was user error. Brought on by not taking 10 seconds to check some settings.

The first recording was done at a park where I was able to get some great ambient noise to go into the background of the recording. The problem was that there was quite a bit of wind going on that day. I hunkered down in a recessed spot in the park and then hunched over the microphone. There was still a bit of wind noise, but not as bad as it would have been otherwise. But, this body position had the result of me sounding like I was on my deathbed. There was no energy. One of the best positions to be in while recording if you want energy is standing or walking around. The worst? Hunched over the mic while sitting in a hole at the park.

I blew the second recording because I did not listen to the input before committing 20 minutes of microphone time. I had my levels set on my recorder for another project and I ended up overpowering the mic. That means that all the sounds from the car (I was driving at the time) are not just heard well, but so loud that that is about all you can hear. My voice going into the mic caused the recorder to almost completely drop out because I was too loud.

*Sigh*

Well, you can at least read about everything I was saying. I will just put off the podcast promo I was going to do until then. I will try to hit it fresh this time. Maybe I can record in the park again without the wind, or I will be here in the studio. I will get something out.