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Replied to The Daily Stillness on Twitter (Twitter)
“Daily Stillness: #tds1136 Fill the silence with…yourself https://t.co/y43cHvKG2x”

Humans today lose their concentration after eight seconds. In the year 2000 it was 12 seconds

And

Multiple temptations to find something to do surface.

Life in the Age of Noise – Original Essay by Erling Kagge via The Daily Stillness

There is a strange paradox here, where reading about the problem or a solution to the problem can be part of the problem.

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Another experimental microcast. I recorded this on a walk last week using the iPhone audio memos app. Just kept a memo open and recorded fragments on the go. Unfortunately at some point I hit done and when I added more, without looking, I recorded over the start.

On editing in ferrite the app crashed everytime. So I switched to Hokusai 2 cut the start pasted it to the end and then levelled in Auphonic. Finally back in Ferrite I added the intro (recorded in Ferrite and run through Auphonic).

This if far too complicated. I also need a dead cat from the phone to cut down on wind noise.

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As part of my summer holiday fun with WordPress I though I might create a ‘proper’ RSS feed for my microcast.

There are quite a few podcast plugins that would do the job but I though it might be interesting to try a bit of DIY.

Back when I started a class podcast at Radio Sandaig I used to create the RSS feed by hand with a text editor and a fair bit of copy and paste. Over at Edutalk we use feedburner to massage the feed for iTunes.

I used information from How to Roll Your Own Simple WordPress Podcast Plugin | CSS-Tricks to get me started with the template.

I copied the feed-rss2.php file from the wp-includes folder to my child theme folder renaming it feed-microcast.php

wp-content/themes/sempress-child/feed-microcast.php

I adjusted the query to get the posts from my microcast category. I also hard coded the title, link, image and a few other things to simplify the process a little.

I then used the template from CSS-Tricks as a guide to adding the various podcast tags to my template.

This ended up with a pretty broken feed, mostly due to my lack of care, but I fixed it up later I got it linked up.

I didn’t want to use the custom post type approach used in the article because that would involve editing all the old posts or converting them to the new type somehow.

My first idea was to create a feed template and switch to that when the RSS feed for my microcast category was called for.

After failing to get the template to switch for the standard category feed, /category/microcast/feed I ended up with a custom feed at /feed/microcast.

and I add

add_action('init', 'customRSS');
function customRSS(){
        add_feed('microcast', 'customRSSFunc');
}

function customRSSFunc(){
        get_template_part('feed', 'microcast');
}

to my functions.php file.

I then spent a bit of time using the W3C feed validation service until I fixed the feed up to valadate.

I’ve still got to get a link to the feed into the microcast category page head tag and I hope to do that as soon as I’ve gone a bit of research. For now I’ve a link in the sidebar.

Here is the template: WordPress RSS feed template for my microcast

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You can’t do without an RSS reader, for the last few years I’ve liked Inoreader.

Surge is a useful tool to play about with making webpages. It is aimed at developers but I think it is handy for dabblers too. Works for static sites. A lot of the documentation is for things beyond my ken (Grunt, Gulp and other things I do not recognise). You can however build la local webpage and easily push it online. Here is a very silly one: Sounds Bad!.

The Daily Stillness | daily small exercises to help you find stillness: a bit like the daily create on #DS106 or this #dailyponderance bu for thinking about your relationship to technology and life.

FlickrCC Stampr This is one I built myself for my primary pupils. The idea was to make it really simple for young children to attribute but ‘stamping’ the attribution onto the image.