Work continued Monday on getting to operational readiness for the video podcast. I posted to the Internet Archive a “coming soon” animatic with audio and also ensured its presence in the video podcast feed. Tools like Keynote, iMovie, and GarageBand were used to put that together. If LibreOffice Impress had the capability to export to video I would have used it instead and would probably have used OpenShot to do the video editing.

I have started work on a shell script to download using cURL the relevant bits from the National Weather Service to piece together a speaking script semi-automatically. If I were feeling sufficiently fancy and had sufficient programming skills I could use the API to pull data to parse in a more granular fashion perhaps. There is discussion on StackExchange as to how such parsing might be done and it is not nearly as clear as it might appear at first glance.

We’re going to launch as soon as possible. The page count of The Star Beacon is shrinking further. If it gets any smaller it will disappear. There aren’t really slots in the schedule of WKKY-FM showing local news being broadcast. None of the stations in the Media One Radio Group Ohio cluster even talk about broadcasting news other than ESPN Radio on WFUN.

There is a gap to be filled. Yes, we’re starting with just the weather. After a time we’ll add in bits from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service in many types. Time will need to be taken to assess the site Open Newswire to see if material can be used from it in English.

Progress takes many forms. We’re not there yet. We’re also only ten days into the year.