Web Standards, Accessibility & More

Podcasts are great. Hard drives are large. But for non-music podcasts, why waste bandwidth, download time, and disk storage with an MP3 encoded at anything more than 32kbps 22khz? Just so the intro song comes in stereo? I say no!

I have an iPod Nano, and it’s “only” 2 Gigs of storage. To some it may seem like a lot of space, and to some it may seem very limited. Either way, I like to squeeze as much music onto it as possible. When I put several 45-minute non-music podcasts that are encoded at a high rate (such as 64kbps 44khz), it sure starts to take a lot of room. The non-music podcasts are usually technical podcasts with just dialog, and a real high quality is just not needed. It’s like driving a Ford Shelby GT 25MPH to the corner store–what a waste! And using smaller MP3 files also saves on internet bandwidth.

The Web Axe podcast is a technical podcast that I run, and it is mostly dialog. I encode at 32kbps 22khz, and each podcast files runs about 3-7MB each. At this rate, the download is very fast, and you can store all 44 episodes one on flash drive! So it ain’t the greatest quality, but I think it’s manageable and user-friendly.

Spam really sucks. It’s bad enough that email spammers hog up our Internet bandwidth and our mailboxes with spam email, but now they’ve been after web forms. I maintain numerous web sites, with many containing contact forms and the like, so now I have a load of work to do to increase the security level on them. I’ve already added security using a free CAPTCHA service, which works fairly well, but downloads a little slowly. Does anyone suggest any others, or have a good PHP resolution to this issue?