What's Happening: Week of February 26, 2018

This week, I have a new landing page for my podcast intro music collection, and a tweak to my home page.

This weekend, I created and uploaded a 90 second YouTube video that includes brief excerpts from my podcast intro music collection.

I also put together a fairly simple web page: http://thisbrucesmith.com/podcast-intro-music.html (careful, it opens in a new tab). The page embeds the YouTube video with a brief description and a call to action (CTA) button. The button takes you to my collection page on Pond5, where podcasters (and/or their producers) can browse to their heart's content and maybe find something they like.

I also created a custom short link through my bit.ly account and use that to link both from the low bar on the YouTube page and from the CTA button. It's http://bit.ly/podintromusic. If all goes well, I'll be able to see what sites (my website, YouTube, or someplace else) refers hits to my collection. I hope this all works out, and if it does I'll let you know.

Now to the tweak of my home page. If you've observed me at any length (and that might be a little creepy so maybe it's best you didn't), you know I have a very set routine for doing my updates (almost always on Sunday nights). Usually I update my home page (http://thisbrucesmith.com) first with my featured royalty-free item of the week. Then I tweet the clip and update my Twitter profile. Since it's almost always from Pond5, I've been using Pond5's Flash-based audio player to make things simple. However, I've suddenly noticed that Google Chrome's new security no longer loves the embedded Flash player.

Furthermore, just in the last few days I noticed that the sites I run (my music site and some others) have been seeing secure (SSL) traffic. I went to https://thisbrucesmith.com and sure enough Chrome said it was secure, which floored me. The only thing that came across as not secure was -- you guessed it -- the Pond5 Flash player.

Now, I don't know if the fact that all of the sudden my site can handle encrypted traffic is a snafu. If it's not, though, I don't want anything on there that a browser might see as unsafe if I can help it. So, I've decided to try updating my Twitter account first, then embedding my Tweet on my web site.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work here, since Blogger doesn't seem to love the Twitter script. So, I'll just keep tweaking.

That's what I know for this week. For those who didn't resort to "TL;DR" thanks for sticking around