listen to africa

While we’ve been waiting for the courier company delivering our parcel to find Laayoune (ten days so far), we’ve spent a lot of our time working on the website, which we never quite managed to finish before we left…

First up, we’ve finally launched our podcast feed! This means you can subscribe to get our sound recordings automatically delivered to your chosen podcast software (eg iTunes) or feedreader (eg My Yahoo) whenever we publish a new piece of audio. Gobbledegook? Our podcast page explains how to subscribe. For the geekier among you, here’s the feed:

If you prefer, you can keep coming to the site and listening to the recordings online in the usual way. After some thinking about the work involved and a suggestion in the comments, we decided not to create a conventional podcast “show” format; the podcast feed has the same snippets of African sounds and voices that are posted in the sound recording section. You may notice though that there’s now a download link to all our audio files in the sounds section, so you can listen to them however you like.

We’ve also added a new section of the website, the microblog. From now on, this is where all our SMS and Twitter updates from the road will go, keeping the main blog for full updates. We’ve done this so people wanting to read full updates can find them more quickly without having to wade through dozens of short updates.

Finally, about our Google Earth layer… As I said, we’ve done some thinking about how much time we’re spending at the computer now that we’re on slow connections and this is one of the most time consuming tasks we have. So, unless anyone very bored wants to volunteer to spend mind numbing hours editing Google spreadsheets on our behalf (I wouldn’t recommend it), I’m afraid we’re going to drop it – for now. We still believe that an audio layer for Africa would be a wonderful thing, so we’re putting it on the list for things we may do when we finish the trip.

And, with that, I officially declare website development over (ha!). Here’s to concentrating on the fun bits: sound recording, photography, writing – and cycling.