Qlog?
/de KN4AQ
"Blog" is so generic, so I'm going to call this Qlog. You can pronounce it any way you want. I'm guessing "Q Log" will be what comes to mind, but I'm thinking it ought to be pronounced just like the word clog. Yep, I get it.
This site is not fully operational yet. It will have to be soon. I have until the end of April to get everything off the old host. Getting this site set with www.HamRadioNow.tv looks like it will be easy. Getting the old www.ARVideoNews, and www.ARVN.tv to 'redirect' is also routine. But getting all the old links out there in the world to point to someplace useful may be trouble. You web guys know more than me. I might ask for help.
Episode 250: NTS... D (as in Digital) is bothering me a little. As I was editing it, (mostly to add titles and a few graphic elements - the content is exactly as recorded), I got the impression that I was being pretty aggressive and rough on my guest, Dave W4DNA, but he didn't seem to mind. It hasn't gathered the complaints (or the sniping) I'd expect on YouTube or QRZ.com. And as I've played it back a few times, I'm less concerned. I do stand by the points I was making - that NTS (the National Traffic System) has been resting on its laurels for decades, while making only creeping progress into the kind of technology that's available now, would allow it to fulfill its mission far more efficiently, but might not be as much fun and engaging to the current or even potential participants. I'm talking about the 'D' part - digital.
Obviously, our digital systems can handle much larger volumes of message traffic, faster and mostly error-free. I was a little surprised and disappointed to learn from Dave that digital isn't more deeply integrated into NTS yet. Well, this was just one interview with one STM (Section Traffic Manager). Sooner or later, I expect to hear from others in and out of NTS with more information and different points of view.
250 woohoo? 250 episodes is a mini-milestone in any show. And I'd encountered a few hams as I was roaming around the RARSfest who began to tell me that they liked the show. So I shoved the camera in their faces and made them tell the world. They seemed happy to do that. That's our Episode 250 celebration. 300 will probably be a bigger deal.
Speaking of all those Episodes... I've been scratching my head about how to handle individual episodes, new ones, and the 250 old ones. I don't have a perfect plan. Individual web pages, like the old days, would be too much work (at least for the old ones). So in the Episodes page, I've created a blog-format where I can just add new episodes, and the site will automatically shuffle them around. But it's not a prefect solution. On the plus side, it allows comments. On the minus, there's no good index, it may be hard to just kind of sift thru titles. I've relegated all the old ones to YouTube - I'm sending you there to browse the old catalog.
One thing I expect to do is create a page for 'Best of' or evergreen episodes that I think viewers would want to go back and see (OK, that I want viewers to go back and see).
So that's going to be a work in progress for some time.
Finally, I noticed that even though I did set the allow comments option when I made the first post (A Blog?), the comment option didn't appear. I found another SquareSpace setting (by actually reading the instructions!) that I had to make to turn them on. So... if you've found the Clog... er... Qlog, say something!
Back to work. It's Quarterly Tax Day (also woohoo).
