Hey Hollywood

I'm going to see Hey Hollywood this Friday at The Door Dallas. Let me know if you want to go, too. :-)

How to embed audio in your blog

Many of us want to embed audio clips into our blog. Here's one way to do it. (There are many ways to do it... none of them are... well... easy.)

First, you need to have a service for hosting your audio files. You can't store them on blogger. Steve found box.net, but check this link for other services. For me, I usually put them on my own web server: gabe.is-a-geek.org.

Two warnings about doing this, though. First, using this method people will be able to directly download the audio file if they want. If you want pure streaming, you'll need one of those other services. Second, if you ever go and delete the file (or move it to a different location), you'll have a dead link in your blog (which is un-cool when people stumble across it in 3 years).

Now that you've got the audio in a form that you can get through a URL (for example, mine is at http://gabe.is-a-geek.org/audio/large-20071113.mp3), you will click the 'Edit Html' tab while editing your blog post and type in something like this:

<embed src="http://gabe.is-a-geek.org/audio/large-20071113.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" autostart="false" ></embed>

The people who read your blog will see something like this:

What they actually see depends on their operating system and what plugins they have installed. For example windoze users will probably see Windows Media Player. On the other hand, in Linux I haven't quite got a good media player for the browser... and with autostart='false' I don't know how to get it started. :-/

And, finally, the audio clip is a Christmas song that's a work-in-progress for me. For you who are non-musicians: don't freak that it sounds a little 80's, has a bad singer (me), and isn't exactly CD quality.