*** From the Archives ***
This article is from January 6, 2009, and is no longer current.
I Think You Can Win This Quizzler
David and I record the InDesignSecrets podcast every couple weeks, and we write posts to the blog as well. So it’s easy for us to think our audience is the same for both, when to a large extent (except for you die hards out there … heh) it’s not. I mean, I know that I subscribe to about twenty different podcasts, but I very seldom go to their blogs. And my blog reader tracks dozens of RSS feeds but I’d be hard pressed to tell you if any of them have podcasts or not.
So I’m making a special post to you blog-readers-only out there, to please listen to the current podcast (episode 94). You can play it right on the home page in the upper right-hand corner, or go to the episode 94 post in the Podcasts section, which contains the audio recording plus all the Show Notes (sponsor discounts, links to sites or downloads we mentioned, and so on). Or maybe you already subscribe to it in iTunes but you just haven’t gotten around to listening yet.
Specifically, I want you to listen to the Quizzler, our occasional “on-air” contest, which comes in around 18:30 into the podcast. Then e-mail us your answer before the deadline of midnight on Sunday, Jan. 11 2009. It’s an easy one — it’s not even a true Quizzler, more like a raffle, where every answer we get is eligible for one of the five prizes. I’m loathe to actually state the Quizzler question here, though, since it wouldn’t be fair to the podcast audience. (I’m kinda bending the rules here with this post…)
We seldom have five great prizes to give away, and I gotta tell you, if you e-mail us your entry by the January 11 2009 deadline, your chances have never been better to be one of the randomly-selected winners of a Quizzler. I’m talking odds and statistical probabilities here.
The “grand” prize (to one randomly selected winner) is the Spyder3 Elite color calibration tool … I wish I could enter the Quizzler myself!
I’ll leave comments open on this post here, but for details on the other prizes, and the Quizzler itself, please listen to the podcast, or post your episode-related comments on its Show Notes page. (But podcast newbies, don’t post Quizzler answers as a comment — they have to be e-mailed to us with “Quizzler” in the subject line, as explained in the episode and in the Show Notes.)
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I wasn’t going to reply to this post, but do you guys have any idea why I might be unable to view this blog at home? I tried IE, FF, Chrome and Opera on WinXP and FF on Ubuntu to make sure it wasn’t a setting in Windows I’d changed, but no luck….
Reason I’m asking is if I could just visit this blog at home, I could listen to the podcasts there, since I can’t listen to podcasts or whatever while I’m at work, and I have a very profound dislike (understatement) of itunes so downloading the ‘casts there is a no-no.
On a side note: am I the only one who hates Adobe for removing the “Adobe dialogs” from the creative suite? I even set up Version Cue hoping that would bring them back, but no such luck :(
I want my ‘favorites’ back in the open, place and save dialogs.
@Roland
If you go to a podcast page and right click on the link you can save the .mp3 to your computer. You can then bring that to another device/computer and play it from there. Although most computers these days have mp3 software to play these files.
https://creativepro.com/indesignsecrets-podcast-094.php
https://creativepro.com/indesignsecrets-podcast-093.php
You can see on both of these pages that there are links to the actual MP3. Just right click (cmd click on mac or one button mouse) and then Save Link As.
Sweet mother of mine, I googled for 10 minutes and found the freeware program “FileBox eXtender” (https://www.hyperionics.com/files/index.asp) which does what I want (and some things I don’t need) in a way that’s even better than Adobe’s dialog, as it’s system-wide.
[[Editor’s note: See Roland’s comment below about potential crashing.]]
Roland, that’s wonderful! Thanks!
Eugene’s tip was great. You can just save the .mp3 right off our web site, using the actual link to the .mp3 file that’s on our show notes. (That’s why we put it there, actually.)
There are many, many other ways to listen and subscribe to podcasts other than iTunes. Podcasts and podcast “catchers” (podcast tracking programs) existed at least a year before iTunes began supporting them.
From our podcast listener stats, besides iTunes, people are using these non-iTunes programs to subscribe and listen to our podcasts:
Juice (open source x-platform):
https://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/
Doppler
https://www.dopplerradio.net/
iPodder
https://ipodder.sourceforge.net/download/index.php
And also basically any RSS feeder like Bloglines or NetNewsWire.
I don’t know why Roland can’t view the site at home. Perhaps it’s some firewall protection, some anti-virus/home computer security etc., web provider or just plain bad luck? But you should check with the support for your internet provider and with the support for whatever firewall or antivirus/home security you have installed to see if they can resolve the issue.
@Roland: I don’t recall hearing about this kind of problem (not being able to access the site at all) from anyone else. It does sound as though it’s been restricted, as though some filter thinks its an adult-image site or something. Perhaps our banter is too risque? ;)
I wish I knew what caused the ‘blocking’ of this site, but I’m at a complete loss. It was such a cold cold Christmas without IDS ;)
@Eugene: I never saw the links before… Suddenly I feel really stupid *insert shameful look here*
Anne-Marie or David, could you remove the info about that program I linked to before? I installed it at home and ended up with huge problems (explorer.exe kept crashing). In the end I managed to uninstall it but then had to use a registry cleaner to get rid of stray files that kept crashing my computer.
At work it works like a charm, but unless it’s flawless on more than one computer, I don’t want to advertise a program :)
By the way, cleaning the registry seems to have had a positive side-effect: I can get here from home too now :)
Roland – I suspect you have more problems with your home computer than your realise.
Who won the quizzler? And what were the results of the survey?
We’re announcing the winners in the next podcast, which we recorded last night. It should be up on the web shortly, next day or two. (It’s a little complicated because we’re working around David’s training schedule in Dubai … we recorded it while he was there and I was here in Chicago, pretty neat!)
We’ll also share which posts garnered responses, with links to them, and some extracts from people’s emails about why they chose that post.
We announce the winners of the Quizzler and talk about some of the posts they ranked as their favorites in episode 95 of the podcast.
Though it wasn’t a contest, the top two favorite posts of 2008 were Free Guide to Special Characters and 5 Cool Things You Can Do with GREP Styles. Every contributor to InDesignSecrets garnered at least one vote for one of their posts.
Wondering which other posts were user favorites? You can download a PDF summary of the results, including links to posts and comments from user’s e-mails explaining why they were their favorite.