Audio in a blog post?

How exciting would it be if I could run audio through a blog post?

Could I even expand into podcasting territory?

Listen to this...

Did you hear anything good?

HTML for Horizontal Line

This is what the code looks like for a line.

---

You can change the thickness, color, width, alignment - very easily.

Oh yeah, the code:

<hr size="2" width="75%" align="left" color="lt blue"/>

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Adjusting for the bottleneck

My blogging workflow always seems to have a bottleneck. The process goes something like this:

* Idea
* Outline - Thesis - Bulletpoints
* Write article
* Photo(s) - does the article need photos? If so, find image(s), edit, upload, insert, caption, format
* Format Post / review formatting
* Links - find, add, and test any hyperlinks as necessary.
* Add labels
* Publish
* Link out via social media (G+, FB)
* Save copy of post locally (in case google accidentally kills off my blog one day.)

I have more ideas than I have time to write. I can turn most of an idea into a post pretty quickly, and from pretty much anywhere (using a bluetooth keyboard and my phone).

Images, however, are a HUGE  bottleneck.  This is because I can only do them from a desktop computer, and I rarely have free time for that - when I'm at my desktop I'm either working (at the office) or helping a family member (at home.)

(Formatting and activating links would be the next bottlenecks, but they're smaller hiccups and an easier fix..)

So, all of that to say this:

What if I try more text-based posts?

What if I try to write shorter posts, and they're shorter because I have less fluff and I get right to the meat?

What if this allows me to post more frequently?

That's the big idea for 2016. In fact, this is just a test post to see what the formatting looks like when I publish from the Blogger app on my phone.

Fingers crossed.

- Chris Butterworth

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What are we doing with youth sports?

Your kid likes playing sports, so you encourage it. He shows improvement, so you introduce him to better competition via club sports. He soaks up coaching like a sponge and becomes a great player and an even greater sports fan. You're looking ahead to the future - high school, college, and lifetime enjoyment of the sport. And then he gets a concussion, and all you can think about is his head and his future in everything other than the sport, and you just want to wrap him in a protective bubble. What are we doing with youth sports?

When will a company own a professional sports team?

I've been expecting it to happen for a decade, as the mega-conglomerates have continued to grow in size and wealth. Why stop with having the Phoenix Suns play at US Airways Center? The company would get far more advertising bang if ESPN said "the US Airway Suns" a few hundred times a week. (Hell, they could drop the 'suns' and be called the US Airways.)

Cities are fighting increasingly tight budgets these days, while corporations are reporting record profits.

When will I see the Target Timberwolves play the Coca Cola Hawks?

amazon squishes freemium cloud player service

Freemium is a GREAT model, when it works. But what happens when a company gets frustrated and takes a shorter-term view on their monetization strategy?

Amazon's MP3 Player, released last year, was perfect. Simple, functional, flawless sync'ing with android, and has the best android music app I've ever used. On top of all that, they offered 5gb of music storage-usage for free.

Then they got impatient.

Recently they squished up the cloud music player to serve up ads.

Now they're limiting free usage to 250 songs. More than that will cost $25/yr.

Grrrr. That's frustrating.