Sunday, February 27, 2005

Update - Slapcast Hola amigos y amigas: No podcast as I had hoped I'm afraid. I have been agonizing about bandwidth. As podcasting becomes more widely known my traffic has increased exponentially. I used to expect about 2.5GB of downloads during the week following a new episode of Really Learn Spanish and just a healthy trickle thereafter. For the past three weeks though I've been dropping about 1GB every two days and that's been without any new posts! I was using Streamload to host the mp3 files at a cost of $9.95 a month for unlimited storage but only 10GB worth of bandwidth. I was at the point of making an announcement that I was going to cease podcasting until I've figured out how to use cheaper but much more technically demanding web hosting when I came across a reference by Dave Winer about Roger Strickland's Slapcast. This is an excellent service albeit still in beta. I now get 1GB of storage space for $4.95 (that should be good for about 200 podcasts) and, best of all, unlimited bandwidth. So now this technical hurdle has been dealt with I'm hoping to do the fourth instalment during the course of this week and upload it by the end of next Monday, 7th March. On the comments to this blog and via some direct emails there have been a number of suggestions for topics and in the next few episodes I will be dealing with: Mastering the use of indirect and direct pronouns; Reflexive verbs; Conversation skills for "sitting round the dinner table" (Eddis Jefferson) How not to translate phrasal verbs into Spanish (Drew Domkus) Usage of the different forms of the past tense in Spanish (Paul Wilson) More on what novels to read in Spanish (Ian McCallum) More on regional pronunciation (Erich Viedge; Andres Corral) ¡Hasta pronto! 11:30:31 PM    comment []