Podcasting

In case you didn’t know, I’ve been heading up a weekly podcast for over a year a now. MODSonair is a show covering gaming topics in the news that relate around the MODSonline.com community. A lot of PC gaming topics are covered.

I recently started getting into using Google documents to write the weekly topics list. The benefit is that I can invite the other hosts of the show to view the topics list rather than having to email it to them after every change as we approach the weekly recording date. This topics list contains the title of an article we will discuss as well as any relevant URLS. We can use these links to research the topic for discussion and then post these notes along with the show for the listeners to follow-up on if the want.
In using Google documents, I resurrected an old utility that is starting to become out dated. I used to use notepad which didn’t accept text formatting… a good thing for easy-to-read notes. However, Google Documents don’t strip out the formatting of text such as the copied title of an article found online. This utility for FireFox does that very easily.

CopyPlusURL is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize what is copied when you right click your selection on a page. I set it up to copy the selected text, insert a line break, then also copy the URL of the page. This is perfect for the topics list. The problem is that this extension is only good for FireFox 1.8 and older and we are up to version 2.0. Luckily, I found a fix and I will post it here for you now… good for reference for me too later when I forget.

• Download this modified version of the extension. Follow the prompt to install.
• Restart Firefox and then close it again.
• Navigate to your preferences file for Firefox. It should be located at C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles
  prefs.js
• Open prefs.js with a plain text editor.
• Locate any lines that start as:
  user_pref(“copyurlplus
• Delete these lines and then you can start to add your own. For information, search google for the CopyPlusURL website. It’s old, but contains all the information you would need. I added the following lines for the MODSonair topics:
  user_pref(“copyurlplus.menus.1.copy”, “%EOL%%EOL%- %SEL%%EOL%%URL%”);
  user_pref(“copyurlplus.menus.1.label”, “MODSonair”);
• Save the new js file. Close the file. Restart Firefox. Open a page, select some text and right click to find your new options.

Now, if you want to know about recording methods, setup ,etc., that’s a whole other post. You’ll have to coax me into posting that one. lol.