For a while now, I’ve had a Pinterest board dedicated to the DJ culture. This morning, I read an email from Serato announcing their Serato Pyro release for iOS. One click led to another and I ended up on YouTube watching a video about Pyro under the hood. It was a longer video so I was going to flag it to watch later. I decided that I had so many DJ-related YouTube videos in my “Watch Later” list that it might be better organized if I just create a channel playlist for it. Don’t know why I didn’t think about it before.
Maybe because I only started just playing around with YouTube channels a couple weeks ago. It started when I created a “Pick Me Up” playlist of songs/videos based on the “Inspire” playlist I have set up in Google Play Music.
YouTube version of “DJ ReCreator: I’m Beautiful Mix”
During my mid-career retirement in 2015, I had a chance to revisit and spend time on hobbies such as DJing. I dug up old recordings from CD burns, MiniDiscs and even cassettes 🙂 I also added a few newer mixes using mp3s, time-coded vinyl and Traktor software. Everything was converted to mp3. After finding a site to upload my mixes, I compiled a collection of my recordings and made them available on MixCrate.com.
The whole process was fun. I got some initial engagement in terms of likes and downloads then things tapered. Interesting how fleeting things are these days with all the “noise” and options out there for our on-demand generation. Anyway, I got pulled into starting my next career chapter and stopped spending as much time on the DJ stuff.
Recently, I had the idea of expanding my reach by using YouTube…but how? I’ve seen many YouTube ‘videos’ that were primarily music with a static image as the video. I didn’t want to go that route. So I thought about ways I could add motion to my mixes so they could be uploaded as videos. The challenge was to do it without making it such a big production. iTunes has the Visualizer built into the player and I enjoy watching the hypnotic movements as the tracks play. Doing a little research and testing, I tested a few screen recorders and then made YouTube videos using screen recordings of iTunes Visualizer while my mixes played. The first batch of videos is now uploaded to my YouTube channel. They’re not getting much attention. Maybe they never will. It doesn’t bother me too much because I enjoyed the process of testing an idea and figuring out out to pull it off.
View The Resulting Videos:
How I did it…
Downloaded Bandicam Screen Recorder as a trial to test. It worked better than the other free software I tested and it had good reviews. A few trial runs is all I needed. I went ahead and purchased the registered version of the software for $39 because I didn’t want the large www.bandicam.com watermark to be included with the video output.
Loaded my mixes into iTunes as single song playlists so that I could record the visualizations without having to worry about captures bleeding into the next track in queue.
Aligned the iTunes window and Bandicam’s screen capture frame so it was a 16:9 aspect ratio (1280×720 recommended). I didn’t want the screen recorder to capture my mouse movements so I chose not to do full screen.
As cool as visualizer can be, all the videos looked too similar so I began manually changing the visualizer theme in sync with the music as it recorded.
I uploaded each video via the interface in my YouTube account. While each video uploaded and processed, I added descriptions with track names and a link to the corresponding mix available on MixCrate.
If the opportunity presents itself, I may actually take the time to produce videos for my DJ mixes and not just screen recordings. Baby steps.
The intent is to focus on topics I already write about in my personal journal. Of course, there are details I will exclude for obvious reasons, but many of the topics cover passions and interests that I’m sure many people share. This is my way of sharing and contributing to those communities.
Why
To benefit others with similar interests, challenges or experiences by sharing insights and lessons learned. Or simply to entertain with personal stories.
I have the ambition to author and self-publish a book someday. It is my hope that this blog will exercise my writing and help me determine what topics would be worthy of a book.
How
Generated ideas for content, context, structure and execution plan. This project started with one of my recent journal entries. (I keep a personal journal using Journey by Journal. This is one of my favorite apps and I’ll likely dedicate a post to it later). I jotted down several ideas a few days ago as part of a daily practice (see author James Altucher) and this was one of them. I must have been inspired that morning because the ideas kept flowing, came together and I got excited to start right away.
I registered two domain names, donndurante.com and prodabbler.com, using my existing account with MyDomain.com. They each cost about $9/year and it was quick and easy because I’ve registered many domain names in the past. I’ve always been tempted to register my name as a dot com but never really had a good idea about what content it would house. Now I do. ProDabbler.com made sense to me since the overarching theme for this blog is my experience dabbling in several areas throughout my life. ProfessionalDabbler.com was already taken but I like that prodabbler is shorter and still easy to market if I ever decided to promote the blog. I’m actually surprised that prodabbler wasn’t already registered. There are enough self-proclaimed “professional dabblers” online, I’m curious why nobody thought about claiming the domain. Anyway, I’m glad it was available. For now, I’ve just set it up to redirect to donndurante.com
Setting up server space was the next step. I already have an account with 1and1 which hosts several sites I still keep up and running. (Those sites have been on autopilot for many years but something tells me I shouldn’t give up on them just yet.) It was relatively quick and painless to configure the new domains registered with some dedicated space under my 1&1 Unlimited Contract. That package has plenty of available server space and allows me to run several domains under one account. 1&1 also has great features including an AppCenter that made setting up a hosted WordPress site very straightforward. Linking MyDomain registrations with 1&1 hosting can take up to 24 hours or so to propagate but in actuality, it only took a couple of hours.
WordPress was the obvious platform choice for me. Not only is it well established and feature rich, it is already integrated with my hosting service and responsive to mobile devices. With earlier sites, I experimented with using CSS to manually create my own sites using responsive design…I found it took too much effort for something that is already included with WordPress themes and templates. Using the 1&1 utility wizard, it only took a few minutes to install WordPress and have it ready on the server space assigned to it.
This step is where the creativity kicked in. After updating some of the general settings, I started customizing the site:
I searched for a theme that caught my eye. I wanted something simple yet stylish. Filtering the search results by newest first, I found a theme called “Curiosity Lite”. It had a layout that I thought would fit the concept I had in mind.
Once installed and activated, I began organizing the blog by adding pages, categories and placeholder content. I uploaded some media and played around with placement. My initial ideas for images and a logo didn’t display well with the theme so I undid them. I may come back to it later, but for now I’d like to keep it clean. Adding media just to have it feels forced and doesn’t seem to add value.
I wrote a short post titled “And so I begin” to replace the “Hello World” post that comes with the template.
I walked away from writing more even though I was tempted to keep pushing forward and adding as much starting content as time allowed. Like any other activity, it’s important to pause and reflect. I noticed I was getting tired and the writing wasn’t flowing as well. I had other things to attend to anyway so I decided to give it a rest and recharge.
I came back and restructured some of the categories by lumping some topics as sub-categories under more general parent categories (e.g. music and books were grouped under a new category I’m calling “media”). It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference when there isn’t much content, but as the substance of the site grows over time, content structure that is intuitive and well organized makes navigation and search friendlier in the long run. I also went back and started adding relevant tags to posts.
I realized that the hosted version of WordPress doesn’t have built-in analytics. Coming from a digital marketing background, I feel blind when I can’t see the metrics of site activity. There won’t be much to look at until I actually have visitors and site engagement, but it’s one of those things that is good to have in place from the beginning. I search available plugins for “analytics” and chose Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress based on its rating and the total number of downloads. Simple to install and configure since I already have a Google Analytics account.
Knowing that the site will change as it matures, I took a screenshot to capture how it looks today. I wonder how it will look 10 years from now.
From this point, it will be about adding content on a regular basis. Some days I plan to just go back in time and fill in the backstory. Other days will have current experiences that tie into the theme of pro dabbler.
