The JSN - All Fatheads All The Time, Mostly

When it rains it pours...get out your umbrella folks this is going to be a doozy.

With the advent of The Brass Figlagee and the continued greatness of the folks who run the Shep Juckebox/Archive, The Jean Shepherd Project (Fathead Central) and FlickLives we have a sort of Jean Shepherd Network...All Fatheads All The Time..Mostly.

And this is where you come in. Up till now the whole gig for many people has been listening to Shep. This is a great and glorious thing but there is more to be done. Many of the groups , including some projects I work on, are helping not only keep Shep alive but spread him further and wider than ever. What I think should happen next, if its not already happening, is you the listener stepping up and putting your two bits into the mix.

How?

Techology is a wickedly cool mistress. She will give you enough rope to hang yourself in manners pleaseing to her desire. In this age of tech we have easy ways to create MP3s (audacity + a mic), we have the means to distribute them (podcasts, archives, blogs), and we have a rich collection of material to draw from both from the Shep works and outside the body of his work.

So now its up to you. Want to do a documentary on Shep? Go for it. Want to make a mashup of Shep Vs JayZ Vs Benny Goodman? Make it so. Want to rework Sheps works into new works via cutups and mixups? Have at it.

If you build it they will come, and we will distribute it.

Thats another way to help, distribution and spreading of the good word of the head Fathead. Drop a cd or dvd on a pal, inject Shep in your conversations, wow the ladies with your skill on the kazoo.

There has been a core group of folks, may of whom have never met or even know about each other, who have up till now kept Shep alive and available pretty much for anyone to get gratis. This effort cost some of those folks alot in time, effort and cashito. Freely Given is the key phrase here. These projects did not lock down Shep in copyright hell and charged you 20$ a cd. Dearly Got and Freely Given....Its time to take up the burden and distribute it around as well as to create more vectors and content for folks to get into and stay into Shepdom.

Am I just blowing like a cheap steam vent in a crappy NY apartment? I hope not.

Step right up.

Contact your fave Shep Project, or Projects, and ask how you can help, Create stuff, Get to know each other.

The Brass Figlagee

If your looking for a more regular dose of Shep then try out the new Jean Shephered podcast entitled The Brass Figlagee. You can never have too much Shep so the addition of another podcast thats offering up the goods is a mighty cool thing.

Onward

Onward Moreward

I was wishing that folks would take up the call to spread Shep far and wide in whatever newfangled
gizmodic ways would come along, so and they are. In the last few days I have contacted by a fellow fathead looking to do a JS podcast and have stumbled on a couple of xml feeds over on FlickLives.


The one that got me by surprise was a podcast of a reading of the venerable I Libertine.Gadzoooks. the hoax that will not go quiet into that goodnight. Hail the fatheads responsible.

Check here soon for an update on the possible collaborative revamp of this podcast. Lets face it folks I have proven that even with best intentions I am not able to do even the simple task of cutting and pasting urls in a timely manner. If you have any interest in helping take paart in the collaboration just post a note up here.

Onward and Moreward ye fatheads.

Pause and Play

A little bit of life got in the way of keeping the podcast uptodate, that little bit of life is now happily asleep a few hours a day so I can squeeze in projects like this. So here we are again.

After the pause how many folks are left listening? According to the logs there are 186 unique users who have been checking the feed for new shows in October. Thanks for sticking around...now back to the grand fathead....

Getting There from Here

With the frantic growth of all thing podcasting there has come about a plethora of paths to get to the same things. Each path might be more to the liking of some. Here are some ways to get all the shows posted here automagicaly...

1) The raw RSS - The source of it all, a simple rss file that you podcatcher parses. Works great, easy to write in a text editor...nah lets complicate it with all sorts of doodads..

2) Feedburner - One of the early "we take all the grunt work out of podcasting for you" services, Feedburner grabs the RSS feed and wraps it up in a nice looking page. The big deal here is the podcaster gets to see all sorts of statistics for the people who get their podcast via Feedburner. If you can navigate apache logs though it gets you the same thing, less pretty pictures but the data in the raw.

3) Odeo - This service is building up an easy to use interfaces for both publishers and listeners. Somewhere down the road I can hear the jingle jangle of the NickleAndDime bag; folks are convince that they can make money out of anything that gets splattered on the interwebthing(tm).

4) Web Based Flash Player - don't even want to download the files to your computer while you slumber in peace? Ok, this handy dandy little flash app will suck the rss file thru webjay.org and then play the files thru a piece of code on a web page. It even gives you the option to grab the file for keeps if you like what your hearing.

5) Podcast Alley - This is the "Vote for me PLEASE!!!!!!!" website for podcasts. Podcast Alley wraps the feed in a couple of different ways, lists the shows, and then ask folks to vote for their fave podcasts. Its this last part that has driven this site, folks love to be validated with big number hugs and warm smooches of acceptance. So go vote for the Jean Shepherd Fatheads Podcast, come on ya know you want to be part of the ground swell, to say "Hey I was listening to that before it was all cool and hip to listen"....yeeesh gawds, can you imagine what Shep's rant on this would be?:)-

Onward towards the seltzer bottle

Its been a while now since last I posted here, there being very little to say for myself that could add to the Voice of the Shep. More of you are listening, which is a nice thing to know.

So how many of you fatheads are there listening to this feed? On a daily basis from June 27 to July 5th 2005 the number of Unique IP's requesting the feed per day looked like this

June 27 - 41
June 28 - 48
June 29 - 75
June 30 - 68
July 01 - 60
July 02 - 62
July 03 - 64
July 04 - 73
July 05 - 84
-------
575 Request total for those 9 days......
of those 250 where Unique over the span of the 9 days.

250 fatheads grabing and listening to the voice of the old sheperdly one has got to be a sign of something. Brother slobs unite in our new deal on the old man:)-

Stats and Such

Its been over a month now since I started doing the JS podcast. I thought maybe three or four folks would be listening, maybe eight repeating folks at best. I would take a look at all of Feb but our DNS got fuxored for a few days so lets take a peek at the last 7 days of requests.

Unique IP's requesting the feed

Feb 21 - 39
Feb 22 - 44
Feb 23 - 42
Feb 24 - 53
Feb 25 - 42
Feb 26 - 42
Feb 27 - 50
Feb 28 - 46
----
358 Total Request
of those 185 where Unique over the span of the week

So if I am reading this all right 185 folks tried out the cast this last week. Well thats darn cool. Even if just 10% of these folks listened to the shows that still more than double what I was shooting for.

And what does this tell us about the greater mysteries of life and the universe? Absolutley nothing, and in spades. So to all those new FatHeads grabbing the feed, send a big thanks to the guys who run the Shep Archive for hosting all these files and Excelsior etc etc.

Podcasting

Enter Podcasting

And here we are, years gone by and whats the deal?

The live365 stream has been up and going unattended all this time as I did not pay up the fess set out for the "free" service. If you have a live365 account you have been enjoying those 20+ hours of Shep...

My web site has rotated thru a few dozen shows with a good number of downloads.

So whats new? Well since we last posted here netcasting has moved into being timeshifted, from being a push into a pull and getting the name podcasting. And with that though in mind...

The Jean Shepherd Fatheads Podcast

Point your podcasting app at that and every day or three you will find a Shep broadcast of about the same day ..only a few decades time shifted..in your podcasts destination.

Most all these shows are hosted up at the amazing Jean Shepherd Archives who over the years have done more to get the Shep goodness out to more and more folks.

Over time I would also like to include newly created audio pieces of and about Shep, who his stuff is being used today, how it has impacted your life....call it "Messages From The Fatheads"

If you have particular requests or even contributions to the podcast please let me know

As you can tell, not much is happening with Live365. Why is this you ask? Well ask away. Seems the folks at live365 are trying to pay the piper , even the piper who doesn't blow the tune. They are now charging for the services. Welp, this is fine for some but the whole idea was to get the voice of the Shep out to as many folks as would want to hear it in a manner costing little to either end of the connection. And so, what is there is there and will be there until live365 take it down.

In the meantime, head on over to the WSMF Web Thing and look around for the Jean Shepherd link therein. From it you will find my rotating stash off Shep files, amongst other things, that while not streaming will still be steaming with the goodness we all desire.

Fatheads go onward...

Now Playing On the Jean Shepherd Netcast

1964_06_20_THE_SWAMP_AND_MUDHE_WOR_JEAN_SHEPHERD

1964_08_04_SLOBS_WOR_JEAN_SHEPHERD

1965_02_08_PROTECTIVE_COLORATI_WOR_JEAN_SHEPHERD

1965_04_01_GREAT_HAMBURGER_BLO_WOR_JEAN_SHEPHERD

1965_07_10_ERNIE_LIMELIGHT_2_WOR_JEAN_SHEPHERD

1964-07-25_poles_pylons_and_hap

1964-08-29_lost_at_c

1965-03-05_evils_of_drink

1966-05-14_the_prom

1969-09-21_first_day_of_kinderg

1969-xx-xx_fake_shepherds

1969-xx-xx_margate_elephant

1970-08-15_inventions_and_mythsac

1970-09-11_workingontheoldman_scar

1971-01-07_scientificproof

1972-06-06_morse_code_and_cw

1972-XX-XX_Importance_of_Comic_Strips

1974-12-23_christmas_pipe

1977-03-22_The_jersey_devil