Sometimes I like cheese, but other times I'm just testing the ability to post audio to WordPress.

Looks like it's working.

MP3 File

Sometimes I like cheese, but other times I'm just testing the ability to post audio to WordPress.

Looks like it's working.

MP3 File

This is a test post to the Hipcast account at WordPress to verify that the video player will work correctly.

– Dante

Download File

This is a test post to the Hipcast account at WordPress to verify that the video player will work correctly.

– Dante

Testing … what happens to categories?!

Hipcast has been experiencing a DNS issue where some visitors are being redirected to another site.

We fixed the original issue within 30 minutes of it occurring, but DNS is pretty slow with ancillary updates, so we expect that within an hour or two, the new DNS information should be distributed properly across the Internet.

Based on bandwidth usage and logs, this appears to be affecting about 5% of users. We apologize for this issue and we’re doing everything we can to correct it.

Please be aware that if you cannot get to your podcast, or the audios and videos on your blog are not playing for you, it does not mean that others can’t get to them. Only 5% of the network requests are being mis-routed, which means that 95% are being handled properly.

The Hipcast Team

Today we’re announcing the release of a new feature many have asked for. That is the ability to use caller-id to bypass your PIN code entry.

You may now add your number, or the number of anyone you like, to the list of approved callers who may post to your blogs or podcasts.

To set this up on your account, click on the Account Tab, then click “Caller ID”.

The list will show only numbers that have successfully called into our media center using your PIN code, so if you don’t see your number in the list yet, dial into the media center and login one more time, then refresh this page.

When you see your number in the list, select the checkbox next to it, and then select “Grant PIN-less Authorization” from the drop-down list above. Your number is now approved for PIN bypass.

We’ll post some images shortly covering this process.

If you haven’t seen it, you should check out Tumblr.com.

It’s a very basic blogging system with promise, and it’s now supported in Hipcast as a blog service you can post to.

By default, HTML support is off in Tumblr, so you’ll have to disable the “Filter HTML” option on the Settings tab (see pic below). Once you’ve done that, you may post your audio and video directly via Hipcast.

Now, Tumblr is cool, but it is no WordPress.

Not that it’s not powerful, but the author’s focus is clearly on simplicity. However, in our opinion, there is no faster, easier way to get a blog up and running.

Now, there’s no easier way to get an audio or video blog up and running…. Hipcast + Tumblr.

Enjoy!

It was reported to us today that members were unable to post directly to podcasts by phone due to a bug in an update made on Thursday afternoon.

This issue has been resolved, and podcasting directly by phone is now available.

The net result was that your audio was saved in your account, but was not added to your podcast. Automated syndication was also affected as the post did not occur.

Every day, we get more questions from members asking “Why can’t I post to my Blogger blog?” and “Why are you broken?”

The simple answer is, we’re not broken.

Google and the Blogger team, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they wanted to revamp their authentication mechanism. They decided that it should work like no other authentication system on the Internet, completely ignoring user interface and application flow that members understood intuitively.

In doing so, they forced all developers to rewrite lots of code, using huge amounts of new code that was written by a (mostly) disinterested third party, that didn’t work reliably most of the time.

It is for this reason that we took so long to roll it out. We felt that it wasn’t stable for member consumption, and that we wanted to wait until Google and Zend had code that we felt was the minimum of quality that we expect.

So now, when Google informs you that your blog has been “migrated” and cannot be accessed through the mechanisms you expected, you really have no choice but to use the “new” method.

Hipcast calls this “Blogger Beta”.

Why? Simply because we still feel that the whole process is not production quality and that Google hasn’t provided us with enough of a “warm fuzzy” to force all our users to use to the new mechanisms.

For example, as part of the process to implement the “new authentication method”, we asked Google for a certificate (an X.509 certificate that authenticates us as someone trusted by the customers we share).

It’s been 8 months now, and we are still unable to get Google to provide that production certificate. The last communication we had with Google took 4 months, FOUR MONTHS, for them to respond with the wrong certificate.

As a result, we don’t recommend Blogger to those who ask what to use. We recommend WordPress.com. Matt and his team at WordPress are stellar developers and have their hand on the pulse of the blogging community.

Simply put, the WordPress team has their stuff together, and it just works. In fact, we use it for this blog.If you wish to continue using Blogger for your blog, and utilize Hipcast to send audio and video to it, simply click on the “Blogs” tab, and create a new blog service using “Blogger beta”.

You’ll be walked through a little bit of “funk” that is Google, and when you come back to us, just click “Save Changes” and you’re done. You may now post to your Blogger blog to your hearts content.

Best Regards,

Randy Dryburgh
Co-Founder,
Hipcast.com

It’s been a rocky road getting integrated with Google’s Blogger, and we’re almost out of the forest (we do not have a certificate from Google that ‘authenticates’ us, so there will be an error– we are waiting for Google on this one).

If you have received the following message:

Oops!System Error: Unable to connect to blog service (code: C –
com.google.blogger.api.UserMigratedException: The given Blogger
account has been migrated to a Google Account on the new Blogger).

This means that you have had your blog moved from the old Blogger to the new Blogger (going through Google Accounts, the all-Google authentication system, instead of your Blogger-only one).

It is the equivalent of starting a new blog.

How to fix it so you can post the flash video to Google:

1. Log in to your Hipcast.com account and click the BLOGS tab
2. Click ADD NEW BLOG
3. Select “Blogger BETA” from the drop-down list (the page will refresh) and enter a name for this listing in the “Service Name” field.
4. Click the button SAVE AND UPDATE

This will redirect you to Google’s site where you have to grant or refuse access. Choose GRANT ACCESS.

Note: There WILL be an error message from Google:
“This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you continue the process only if you trust the following destination:

http://www.hipcast.com/members/blog/blog_edit.htm
“

We are waiting for Google to get the certificate that treats Hipcast as a trusted source.

After you GRANT ACCESS, you’ll be returned to the page that lists your blogs.
If you are not returned to the blog list page and are returned to the ADD BLOG page, you will need to migrate your Blogger account into a Google Blogger Account

Important: Your blog ID numbers will be new, and the style and design of your audio and video players, preferences etc, will need to be recreated from scratch. As mentioned above, the manner in which Google changed their system, results in the new Google Blogs being treated as a new blog altogether. It’s a one time inconvenience.

Audio and video files are night affected as they are tied to your account, not the blog.

Thanks for sticking with us through this, it’s been quite the cat and mouse game getting these two systems talking, and we’ve been wanting to be able to get a rock solid answer there as much as our Hipcast/Blogger customers have.

Hipcast.com Support

Update: A previous issue that existed and was resolved on 1/18 had resurfaced and has been corrected:

Unable to post to blog service:
DBD::Pg::st execute failed:ERROR: invalid input syntax for integer:
“noname blog”

This affected Typepad blogs only.

–
It appears that Hipcast customers were momentarily unable to post to their Typepad blogs today. We are investigating the cause.

When posting to a blog system is normal for a long period of time and there’s an unexpected interruption in service (ie., no changes are made to your account), it’s generally due to either a network hiccup or the service is unreachable. If Typepad had suffered any downtime today, it would be invisible to Hipcast and postings would naturally fail.

It seems Typepad is currently up. To monitor their status view the Typepad Status page.

We’ve got some long-awaited updates coming this week and in the following weeks. Here’s a breakdown of the various updates:

The new Blogger system - Google recently took the new Blogger out of beta and is requiring blogspot/blogger users to upgrade, resulting in a break in Hipcast-to-Blogger communications. This has taken longer than expected for us to update and we sincerely apologize for the delays and backlog in getting to these support e-mails– we’ve certainly heard you!

A little background about how blog posting works and has worked in the past: When you add a blog to your Hipcast account, you are asked for your username and password and the name of the blog service (and in some cases, the XMLRPC url which is required to talk to the blog software). This is how almost all the blog services operate: Typepad, WordPress (.com and installed versions), MoveableType, LiveJournal, etc. It’s a one-two-done process. (We publish over XMLRPC and support the MetaWeblogAPI and the older BloggerAPI)

The change to Blogger was implemented by Google so that adding a Blogger/Blogspot blog requires that authentication is re-routed through Google Accounts. This improves security for Blogger users, yet could possibly slow down the process for third party services like Hipcast in publishing as smoothly as we do to WordPress, Typepad, and others.

We expect to have new Blogger compatibility pushed live on the 10th or 11th of January.

Caller ID bypass - We’ve had requests for this feature and we’ll be pushing this live in the next couple weeks. If you call Hipcast via phone to record and publish audio, you’ll be able to be authenticated via caller ID if you choose.

Stats/Graphs improvements - Statistics are the lifeblood for many podcasters and we’ll be releasing improved stats and graph functionality to enable you to get a clearer picture of traffic for your podcast and files. We anticipate this will be live in the next couple weeks as well.

Some of you may have noticed a delay in posting audio from your mobile phone or some posts not immediately showing up on your blog. There was a bit of a slowdown with the existing transcoders and we brought some more online.

This had minimal effects and all transcoders are up operating normally.

We’ve been running two numbers for about six months now after notifying Hipcast customers about the switch earlier in the year. The old number has been finally disconnected (we kept both for redundancy), and the new number is 100% in place: +1 (214) 615-6431

Please adjust your speed dials accordingly!

You can find this number in the future when logged into your account under the Audio Tab > My Moblog.

Today we had a momentary interruption in service due to a server restart. Everything should be back to normal and operational.

Anyone experiencing further difficulties that may have arisen from today’s downtime, please use the contact support form to submit the issue (comments on this blog are not directed to the support queue).

Update: Everything is seemingly back to normal; we had a hiccup that was caused as a result from a recent data center move. Contact support through the Hipcast.com web site if you are still experiencing difficulties;

As an aside: iTunes can take a while to update, we’re sending pings to help speed the process if at all possible.

—

Update: Phone postings are transcoding and posting now. Next update on status of existing phone recordings that did not previously transcode….developing.

-Earlier Updates-

We are aware of the issue that some users are reporting about phone recordings not appearing in the audio list, nor posting to blogs or podcast feeds.

“Transcode Error: Unrecognized audio or video format.”

We are investigating and working on the issue.

We’ve had a few questions about Hipcast’s incompatibility with Blogger’s beta system, and posts not appearing in a new blogspot blog.

Currently, our audio/video-to-blog system does NOT work Blogger’s new beta service (this doesn’t affect audio/video-to-podcast feeds, which do not rely on blog systems).

We are working on supporting the new Blogger, even though it’s still an invitation-based beta release.

Blogger’s new version of their service (which is still in beta, technically) requires that we connect to Google’s Account login system instead of Blogger, which means that we must recreate or overhaul our code just for them (Google).

Note: Blogger’s new beta system does not seem to be available to all users who use the old Blogger system. Contact Google for assistance with your Blogspot account.

We’ll post an update when Hipcast is updated to work with the new Blogger.

I just listened to a charming podcast by Claude in Paris.

She asks in it, how does she turn the audio, posted to her blog, into a podcast?

First of all, I see that her blog automatically supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures. So she is all set with that. If she didn’t have that, I’d suggest going over to feedburner for help on setting that up.

But that’s not important right now.

All Claude needs to do to have her audio post become a podcast is to go into Hipcast settings and change the Player Featrues to Publish MP3 Link.

That enables the RSS 2.0 feed to automatically deliver her new audio posts to subscribers.

Here are the steps:

1. Go to Hipcast and click Blogs.

2. Click Blog Preferences on the blog you want to work with.

3. Click the Audio Player Style tab.

4. Change the Player Features to Publish MP3 Link. Then click Save Preferences.

In this Hipcast Workbench I explain how to record, save and upload audio to Hipcast, and post the uploaded audio to your blog.

Discussed in this video:
Hipcast
Quicktime Pro
Audacity

Check out my Audio Upload Demonstration for tips on how to convert a QuickTime Pro created MOV file into an MP3 for uploading to Hipcast.

Note:

If you know which blog you want to post to when uploading your audio, you can specify that blog at the time of upload.

After the MP3 is transcoded to a FLASH file, it will automatically be posted to your blog.

Also, as you can see in the graphic, you can also publish directly to a feed.

How to convert an MOV audio file to MP3.

There are a few extra steps you need to take prior to uploading an audio file that is created with Quicktime Pro. QuickTime Pro saves your audio file as a .mov file. Hipcast needs WAV or MP3. I use MP3.

After recording the audio file with QuickTime Pro and saving it. Here are the steps I take to convert the MOV to MP3.

1. OPEN the MP3 audio file with iTunes.

2. In the ADVANCED menu, choose CONVERT SELECTION TO MP3

That gives you the file location to use when upload the audio file to Hipcast.

Here’s the result:

Audio upload of an mp3 file.

Just as simple as making an audio podcast.

Make sure you have a webcam. Then choose record. Save it, and then choose a podcast to send it to.

It is really, really easy. You don’t have to be a technical at all, and you don’t need talent either.

I recorded this video directly to Hipcast. No saving to disk or editing requred! Easy!

It’s real easy to record audio with Hipcast. You don’t even have to use a computer program to do it. You record directly after logging in. It is SO easy.

This video shows you how to record audio directly up to Hipcast and post to your podcast.

Here are the steps:

1. Go to the Record Audio page.

2. Click Record.

3. Save it with a Title and Description.

4. Select a podcast you want to post to, and post by pressing Publish to Blog.

It’s so easy it’s not funny.

Hi. Steve Garfield here.

This brief video is the first of a series of short videos that will show you how to make audio and video podcast using hipcast.

This is an introduction.

The video from my session at the Media Giraffe Summit is now online:
Merging Forms: Is the Medium Still the Message? [ QuickTime ]

Includes:
Robb Montgomery, Paul Grabowitz and me, plus all the attendees.

It was an unconference done Phil Donahue style. Going through the attendees first to see who they were and what they wanted to learn helped us determine the content of the session.

Some of the things I covered were how to make a blog post and how powerful that is when combined with Google, making an audio podcast using only your cellphone, and making a video using a standard digital still camera and posting that to your blog with a few clicks. Fun stuff.

At the conclusion of the session a number of people came up to me and told me that our session was hte best one that they had attended.

I think part of the reason for that is that we included them in the session in a meaningful way and did a lot of showing vs. telling.

Thanks to Robb and Paul for working on this with me and thanks to Tish Grier for helping out.

mgp2006

We’ve been moving things around to continue our re-naming from Audioblog.com to Hipcast.com… Your old URLs will still work (such as http://username.audioblog.com/rss/……..), as they will with the domain audioblog.com replaced with hipcast.com.

We recommend updating listings in various directories at your convenience. If you have any questions, then please contact us!

One of the things people have told me that they like about Hipcast, is having the flexibility in the ways they can set up where to publish their audio and video. Here are the differences between the three methods that you can selet for getting your audio and video out there, regardless of your level of expertise.

1. Creating and publishing to a podcast feed (no blog needed)
The most painles way to get a podcast created is to create a purely podcast-only feed, that you can submit to the various directories. The audio or video you post will exist in the feed, not on a web site or blog in the traditional manner.

How to do this: Select the “Podcast” tab in your account and “Add New”… you’ll have all the options to configure artwork, genre, and even all the extras needed for your podcast to show up in the iTunes podcast directory.
Difficulty: Easy

2. Publishing to a blog (flash only)
We’ve added most blog services to our system, so there’s not much you need to do other than telling Hipcast which blog provider you use, and your login information. For those that have installed blog software on their own web server themselves, you’ll need to know the special URL that allows Hipcast to automatically publish (no copy and pasting needed). This is called an XML-RPC URL. We’ll do our best to post some example XML-RPC URLs, although your situation may vary.

How to do it: Under the “Blogs” tab in your account, simply Add New Blog. Here, you’ll be able to customize the way your player looks, set categories (if supported) and a variety of other features that are set once– and every post to your blog will look the same.

Difficulty: Easy to Intermediate

3. Best of both worlds
Publishing flash audio or video to your blog *and* enabling podcasting. This is done with a little help from our friends at Feedburner (and is my favorite way of publishing).

Feedburner is a free service that transforms the special address that all blogs have (an RSS feed) into something similar to a vanity license plate. Feedburner has a service called “SmartCast”— which, when activated– will turn any link to an audio or video file– into the secret sauce that makes your audio or video podcast delivered automatically to your listener or user.

How to do it: Simply choose the “Blogs” tab. After choosing the blog you want Feedburner to recognize, select the ‘Audio Player Style’ or ‘Video Player Style’ button. At the bottom of each of those screens, select “Publish MP3 link” or “Publish Download Link” respectively.

This will publish a link to the MP3 or iPod-compatible Quicktime .mov video file along with your flash player, resulting in a better experience for first time visitors, and the automatic delivery that your listeners or viewers have come to enjoy!

Note: This is not a requirement if you only want to publish flash audio or video to your blog. See #2 above

Difficulty: Intermediate to Advanced

That’s it! Three different methods that suit a variety of needs of audio and video publishing.

Thanks for choosing Hipcast.com!

At the recent Personal Democracy Forum in NYC, Hipcast community manager Steve Garfield gave a real time demonstration of how easy it is to take a video using a digital camera, and post that video to a blog using Hipcast.

From Poli/Tech Conference: V-Blogging, Control or No?:

“V-blog aficionado Steve Garfield shared his experiences working on Boston City Councilor John Tobin’s ‘06 campaign. Garfield convinced the candidate to create short video clips for his site — stuff featuring him at local events promoting initiatives, at a council meeting, in the public square, that sort of thing. Evidently, Tobin was so taken with the potential for video blogging and his site he had all his bumper stickers and lawn signs changed to read, ‘VoteJohnTobin.com’ — that’s it. The candidate created a new video for each of the 9 days leading up to the city election.”

The Personal Democracy Forum was a fun experience!

Technorati tag: pdf2006

At the recent Podcast Academy at Boston University, Hipcast community manager, Steve Garfield presented Video Podcasting and showed the attendees the features of Hipcast.

Watch the presentation in a pop-up window:

Click here to watch

Here are the direct links:

Video Podcasting
(Steve Garfield, Rocketboom)
Download the PowerPoint presentation.
Download the video. (.m4v Length: 57:16; Size: 334MB)

Podcast Academy at Boston University | Podcast Archive of all sessions.

Sites mentioned in my presentation with links.