All Streamed Up

You may have noticed that there have been some changes around here.  Namely the 'Streampad' bar which now appears at the bottom of the page.  Until Sunday I was using Yahoo's Web Player application to stream all the episodes of 'The Sleazecast' currently posted on this blog.  This was a really neat and unobtrusive way of streaming media (it manifested itself as that grey tab which appeared on the left edge of the page).  Unfortunately, with virtually no warning, Yahoo decided to discontinue it.  So, as of Monday, there was no easy way for visitors to listen to our podcasts.   As I quickly found, there simply isn't anything out there which performs the same tasks in the way as Yahoo's Web Player.  Most media players require their code to be embedded individually for each post that includes audio.  Which is cumbersome and tedious beyond words.  However, I eventually stumbled across Streampad  which does almost the same thing.  It's more obtrusive and far less versatile than Yahoo Web Player, but right now it is all I've got!  That said, as it doesn't appear to have been updated since 2009 and seems to be affiliated with AOL, I have grave doubts that it will last much longer than Yahoo Web Player.  But hopefully it will be around long enough for me to find a more permanent solution.

All of which brings us to the thorny issue of the much delayed next instalment of 'The Sleazecast', which was promised for May, but somehow never materialised.  I had every intention of putting together this missing episode, but somehow it never happened.  In part this was down to the fact that the new-style 'Sleazecast', which debuted with episode thirteen, is just so time-consuming to produce - I'm afraid that there have simply been too many other things competing for my time for to justify devoting large chunks of it to an audio project.  Coupled to that has been a complete lack of inspiration.  I thought that I had ideas for a new episode but, upon closer examination, I ended up rejecting most of them.  However, I've recently started recording segments for the next episode and I've had some more, better, ideas.  I've also made a decision to drop out of another ongoing project I thought that I was contributing to, but recent events have made it clear that I'm basically a spare wheel there.  Instead, I've decided to focus on my own projects for the foreseeable future.  tarting with that delayed episode of 'The Sleazecast'.