So I’ve come to an internal agreement. Actually, it’s more like an admission of defeat. Either that, or it’s a sudden ability to see that the easist path has been plainly in front of me the whole time. Call it what you want, but I ain’t happy about it.
See, for the past eleventy-thousand years, I’ve been trying to build a website to showcase my music. After spending countless hours drooling, shit-for-brains, while staring at my laptop hoping to spontaneously grok everything I needed to do and write all the code to my own fluidly-custom specifications, I’ve given up. I’m stupid. So stupid, I’m gullible. I managed to convince myself that I had enough mental energy left over at the end of my workday to set up to the task of building a website from the ground up. How foolish I am!
So, having gotten half of a notion last summer to give up coding a full Ruby On Rails website, I decided to try some pre-rolled frameworks. I looked at Drupal and WordPress, among a few others. Since I already had some modicum of “experience” with WP, and since Drupal has a steep learning curve, I went with WP. And what did I discover? WP version 3 unleashed a new feature where you could make your own custom post types, so you can create a Song and have it display along with your regular Posts, Pages, and Attachments. “Astounding!” I exclaimed. “Just add my Song code and build a template, and I’m home, sweet mother of god, HOME!”
Herein, we shall call this moment The Second Great Con of the Man On Himself.
The problem, you see, is that WP 3.0 has half-assed support for custom posts. It doesn’t pull posts made from different types into feeds, doesn’t include them into the front page, doesn’t support archives. For that, you need a WP plugin developer’s mind, and the free energy, street smarts, and tenacity to navigate the byzantine WP wiki in the hopes of finding the help you need to make this happen. As it turns out, custom post types just aren’t user-friendly.
Since my job requires me to be task-based and results-oriented all day, every day, I just can’t summon up the smarts or desire it takes to actually make this stupid little dream of mine into a reality. When I’m settling down for my evening coffee, trying to unwind my head and get into my projects for the night, you know what I really want to be doing? Absolutely nothing. Now I understand the attraction to clicking on the TV and turning yourself off. I can’t do this anymore.
I lost my love for the web. Giving up. And now my task is much simpler. There are plugins for WP that allow me to stream media and set up podcasts. They make things on the back end much easier, but they are neither custom nor completely intuitive to use. That’s the tradeoff. And right now, I’m trading in my programmer’s hat for a dunce cap. The internet has won.
Hurp a derp.
Dude, I just installed the Podcasting Plugin by TSG on my WP site so’s I could post a few songs. I don’t know how great of a plugin it is for what you’re doing, but it works for my limited purposes.
I gave up on building a site from the ground up many moons ago. I still feel like a pussy sometimes, but, hell, I don’t have the time for that. I barely find the time to blog at all.
I’m planning to use PodPress which, on the front-end, uses the same player applet as the Podcasting Plugin in use on your site (I think the applet’s name is 1Pixel or something like that).
PodPress also has some other features like links for downloading, external player windows, and listener statistics. The documentation on the PodPress site is lackluster and hidden amongst a ton of suspicious links and sponsor ads, but outta-tha-box it looks like it might fit the bill. So long as I don’t go wanting to customize it.
Ya know I didn’t get all the technical stuff, but I understood anyway.
It sucks, don’t it?
Sorry.
K