I'm still working on ways to upload audio files as part of my blog. As I noted in my previous entry, this worked great using my Posterous blog, but isn't as easy in Blogger, as Blogger doesn't allow you to upload an audio file. To get around this, what I have done is:
- Upload the audio file into my Google Docs account
- I made sure to change the share settings for the file in Google Docs so that it is set to be visible to anyone who has the link
- Then I copied the link from Google Docs
- Here in my Blogger blog I can share the link. If you click on this link it will take you to my Google Docs
This isn't a great option as in my experience the more steps you require of an end user to be able to access something you share with them online, the less likely they are to follow through and access it. If it works simply, quickly, intuitively with one click, and if it doesn't require actually downloading anything (i.e. users can view online, rather than downloading audio file, pdf or other file), then it increases the likelihood that people will access the file.
I did find some guidelines about audio files in Blogger, and it seems that they are advocating variations of what I describe above. Here are some guidelines about this:
- Posting music/audio
- A consuming experience. This describes a much more complicated approach where you combine the audio with a stationary screen shot to make a video, and then upload this video into blogger (why Blogger allows you to upload video and not audio beats me!). While this is a clever idea to use this workaround, it's really a lot more work to do and may put off a lot of folks (like me!) who want a quick and easy way to upload audio files.
My evolving thoughts on this:
- If I wanted to use my blog to share a lot of audio files, then I might consider using Posterous rather than Blogger as my blog too because if the ease of uploading audio files.
- Another thing that I also prefer about Posterous is that I can sign into it using more than one email. This is important since I currently have to use my personal gmail account for my Blogger blog rather than my education gmail, and use separate browsers for each, because of the security restrictions on the education account. But, for now, since this tech blog is in Blogger, I'll stay here -- at least for a while!
3 comments:
Helen,
I'd encourage you to try out dropbox (www.dropbox.com). Not only is it a great backup tool, but you can access your files between computers. In addition, you can put files in a public Dropbox folder and get a link to share them with people. If you remember when I did my Domain E assessment project for student teaching, everyone was able to go to a URL that had my spreadsheets and other information. I think that would be the easiest way to share audio with your readers.
-Peter B
I just remembered something else: you might want to look at Sound Cloud - http://soundcloud.com/ - if you're looking for something that works well specifically for audio files. You should be able to embed an audio player into your blog post using HTML.
Peter, thanks so much for your suggestions. I use Drop Box and love it, but hadn't thought of using it as a place for my adio files (I do remember you using it - that was the first time I had ever had anyone share a Drop Box file with me and I thought it was very cool!). I'm going to try this. I also will take a look at Sound Cloud - thanks for the suggestion. This is exciting to have input on my questions! :)
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