A fun recent activity has been helping out with the assembly of Boise Song Talk, a web site that features episodes from last year’s TV series. It was shown on TVCTV, a public access cable channel in Boise, ID, in case you were wondering “how did I miss this?”. I watched the episodes through their Web site, because my rabbit ears aren’t quite powerful enough to get the regular broadcast. But sometimes their web site had problems, so I missed a couple of the shows. Not a problem now – I can watch the shows whenever I feel like it.
But the thing I wanted to highlight about the web site project was that we’d used mostly free materials to put it together. We used wordpress.com for the web site (free) and vimeo.com to host the video (also free). The domain name registration didn’t cost much at all. Eight bucks. So, basically free. This week we decided that it would be good to provide audio-only versions of the shows, so I used the free-tier Amazon web service to host the mp3’s, then used the blog component in WordPress to generate the RSS feed, ran that through Feedburner to get an iTunes-friendly podcast feed, and then submitted that to the iTunes store. All free.
This was satisfying in a couple of respects; it was very much in the spirit of the public access cable origins of the content, and it dovetailed nicely with my cheapskate ways.
mellowcat 
Boise Song Talk would not have happened like this on the web without Mellowcat! People in Boise see me leanin’ against buildings and wonder “How could a guy like that pull this off”? I tell them it’s like the Wizard of OZ….it’s the guy behind the curtain….it’s the Mellowcat. I gotta run now, this building is startin’ to move. JCS