Our New Broadcasting Home

First of all, I want to thank everyone that has been loyal to the show, and our ups and downs since the blogtv shutdown early last year. I know that many of you have had trouble opening the show on the webs.com site because of the ads, the way I had to cobble it together using code from other sites for the player and the chat and sometimes just logging into the site to watch the show has been more of a hassle than anyone should have had to deal with. You guys and gals are great, Indie Spotlight wouldn't even still be broadcast live on the internet if it wasn't for you. No seriously, I would have hung up my headphones and said the hell with it long before now if it wasn't for the fact that if I wasn't there doing the show someone would have missed it.

I'd also like to thank LiveStreamCast.org for hosting the show since I found you back in June of 2013 after the blogtv shutdown and the awdio.com disaster. Last Sunday was the first time that your player didn't work, out of all the other nights that it did, I have no complaints other than sometimes the ads that you display are, well for lack of a better word for it, are kinda out there at times but most of my viewers use ad-blocker so they were spared the worse of it so no worries.

Now, for the big announcement. As I said before I'm only moving the show one more time. If this doesn't work out, I hate to say it but as far as Indie Spotlight, I'm done. Should it be "that time" I'll be the first to admit that I will have a hard time hanging up my headset as far as this show is concerned but if this doesn't work out, then yes, I will put it out of it's misery and focus on some of the other internet projects I am starting to plan for next year.

Some of the issues that have come up in the post blogtv era that I feel have hurt the show are the following;

The weird ads that have popped up on our webs.com site, mostly because I'm using borrowed code from other sites that I have no control over.

Some people have had issues loading the player.

Others can't load the chat

Others still just can't load the site.

Because the show wasn't being hosted on a site that hosted other shows there wasn't any traffic to the show besides our die-hard supporters and so the chat wasn't near as busy as it was when we were on blogtv.

No live music, since I have no other choice but to use the encoder I can't co-host anyone other than use Skype.

Since there hasn't been as much traffic to the show, I haven't invested as much time preparing it as I used to, in fact, not even close. I've been recycling the same playlists for weeks now.

I could go on.......

Here is where moving the show to our new home will solve most of that. On the site that I will be using we can have live music and it looks like it will be easy to make that happen.

On the new site, the place hosting it has a ton of "radio" oriented shows although I think I might be the first show on it broadcasting indie music.

Did a test show there last Sunday, and made a new friend, first night ever on the site.

So.........................

(drumroll please)

I will ask everyone to reset their bookmarks one more time, starting this Sunday at 9 pm (eastern U.S.) please join us at our new home at http://justcast.org/users/indie-spotlight-live

Again, thank you all for your continued support and I hope to see you at our new home!

My Player Wouldn't Work, So I Tried justcast.org Tonight....

.... justcast turned out to be pretty awesome.

Ok, here is what happened tonight, the site that hosts my media player for the show was down, I've been wanting to play around on justcast but haven't had the time so since the player that I've been using (which has been trouble free up until now) was down I decided why the hell not?

I'm happy to report that the site worked really well overall, they are still having some growing pains from what I've been told but I didn't have any issues tonight.

Look for the "official" announcement this week but I think we might dump the site that we created on webs.com and use this instead.

Stay tuned....

Adventures in Ubuntu (Linux)

Trying to get a streaming player when we're not broadcasting live has been a handful to say the least. I'll be honest while I'm learning a lot about Linux I think that if I had it to do over again, I would have just cleaned out all the garbage that was on that computers previous XP install, and found a way to make that work instead. At the end of the day since I am not planning on using it for any other reason other than to stream the show I don't think it would have mattered anyway.

That being said, I've already wiped it and have done the Ubuntu install, so at this point I really don't have much of a choice other than to run with it. The challenge (besides learning a new operating system) has been finding a player that can link up with the player that I use for the show. I really wish I had done my research, I would have known that the Adobe Flash Media Encoder wasn't supported in Linux.

I guess it doesn't matter now, like I said I'm already in the fight since I've already wiped the Win Xp off of it. There are programs that work similar to the FLME, it's just been a matter of finding which one, and how to install it ect. since I'm doing this on a totally new (at least to me) operating system and learning how it works. Ubuntu is great, but it is still way different than Windows.

Still working on this though, the biggest reason why is that currently the traffic on the show is reminding me of when we were on blogtalkradio. Not a lot of traffic during the live show, but we had a ton of hits on the archive, so I'm still thinking that if there are previous shows streaming on the site when we aren't broadcasting live, people will check that out just as they did on BTR which still gives the musicians the "spotlight".

And that, is what Indie Spotlight is all about anyway. It is taking more time that I expected to make this work, but I will make this work.


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Show updates;

Sunday nights are still played live on our webs.com site and will be for the foreseeable future. While I did check out another broadcasting site (justcast) I haven't even created a profile there yet much less played with it. Just haven't had time.

I may also need to move the official start time of the show from 9 p.m. to 9:15, I've been working more Sunday nights lately and it's been a challenge to get home on time, and ready to broadcast at the 9 o'clock timeslot.

Linux Experiment Part 1

The Linux Experiment

I found a good working tower at the Salvation Army yesterday that was running Windows XP. Since Microsoft doesn't support it anymore I'm taking it and doing what I've always been curious about and installing Linux on it.

I have the video camera going and recording along the way any issues that I've found. The purpose of this machine is to stream the show when I'm not actively broadcasting but since I've always been interested in Linux I intend to play around with it as well.

Will keep you guys posted.

October Update

It's hard to believe that it was a year ago that I was surrounded by a sea of boxes, bags of cloths, newspaper wrapped knick-knacks and was blogging about a hiatus from the show.

Nothing seriously new to report, we are still broadcasting live and going strong on our webs.com site that I created last year, the only new wrinkle is that I found a new site that seems to cater to the kind of show we do (justcast.org, see previous blog post) that I might play around with and see what kind of traffic we get over there.

Might as well lol

JustCast

I found a site last week that I'm thinking of trying in addition to the Sunday night show, it's called Just Cast.

Their Terms of Service is simple and doesn't claim any license or ownership of content and it seems that there are music oriented shows there vs. iVlog.

I'll let you guys know if I decide to do it.

Troy Castellano Project 52 Week 39

From Troy;

Project 52 Week 39! This week song is called "If These Boots Could Talk". I'm not sure if it's a great thing to write about but I have these pair of boots that I've had for about 18 years. They have been with me to every major gig I've played and every cool party I've been to. Pretty much almost every good time I've had in my adult life these boots have been there. Man, the stories they could tell if they had the ability to talk. I know they'd remember more than I ever did! (but then again no one should know some of those stories LOL). They are also the most comfortable pair of boots/shoes I've ever owned. They'll probably out last me! Maybe I'll take a pic of them and post it in this thread. Any way, this is song about my boots :) . Hope you like it! Please keep sharing, liking and commenting on these P52 videos. It helps immensely!