## The Ridge Podcast

I would like to announce [The Ridge Podcast](https://theridgepodcast.com "The Ridge Podcast"). As many of you may know, I own and co-host a podcast where my co-host, Jeffrey Luke Watson, and I interview local people and ask them questions. We have interviewed veterans, business owners, elected officials, candidates, teachers, and others. We started it as a way to get to know prominent figures in our community, and as a way to learn more about different professions.

At the time of writing this, we have recorded 15 episodes and published 13 of them. We have released one episode per week since starting, and we have no plans of slowing down. Over the summer it may be difficult for us to continue releasing episodes at this rate but we will do our best to hold ourselves to this standard.

Below I will explain the different aspects of the podcast.

## Technical/Content Creation Aspects

I handle all technical/content creation aspects of the podcast, including but not limited to: recording, editing, hosting, writing, publishing, advertising, and scheduling. I have learned many valuable lessons as I work on the podcast.

### Web Hosting

I have provisioned Wordpress on top of Docker Swarm to handle all of our Web Hosting needs. At the time of writing, it performs well enough for our needs. Our network connection is the biggest limiter, however, as I am unable to afford expensive hosting solutions with lots of bandwidth. I elected to use Seriously Simple Podcasting to handle all of the backend podcasting settings for Wordpress.

### Microphones

I place RØDE Wireless Microphones on me and Luke. The guest gets their own dedicated studio microphone on an arm.

### Editing

I use Audacity, which is FLOSS and aligns with my ethics. I find Audacity to work very well and I enjoy using it.

### Social Media

I primarily utilize Instagram for social media advertising. I upload photos and videos, usually audiograms, to Instagram to try to give listeners a sneak-peak into the latest episode and encourage them to listen to it.

### Networking/Scheduling

Email. I use email. Also sometimes text messaging. I have found email to work best with others. Email. There are worse things.

## Our Audience

I am not going to share any hard numbers, because I do not fully believe our Spotify and Apple Podcast metrics, but our audience is pretty evenly split between adults in their early 30s to late 50s and teenagers around 15-18 years old. I think this is accurate enough. It takes into account all of the listeners from school and all of the adult listeners that we have gained around the community.

## Take a look!

That is basically it for this blog post. I would like to post here more often, especially as I would like to resume doing reviews/technical writing, but only time will tell if that will actually happen. Feel free to take a listen to the podcast and send us feedback! Thanks.


The Ridge Podcast

## Hello World! How does this site work?

This is my blog, which features some pretty cool stuff. For example, code highlighting, quote changers, and an about page.

Code highlighting!
<SyntaxHighlighter language="javascript">
{`
const doStuff = () => {
	return console.log('hey');
}
`}
</SyntaxHighlighter>

It is built on NextJS, React, and Express (although not much express is used.). I also use some pretty cool smaller libraries for various different functionalities.

Blog posts are written in MDX.

Additionally, the cool quote changer on the main page is powered by an [API](https://github.com/ethancedwards8/ethancedwards-quotes/) that I wrote! Powered by Python and Flask.

Although at the time of writing, the site may not be the prettiest, I am confident that it will look good in enough time.

You can view the site source code on [GitHub](https://github.com/ethancedwards8/ethancedwards.com), feel free to submit pull requests if you see anything you can improve on!

## A bit about me

Right now, I am a full time student, working concurrently on both my high school and college degrees. Despite being a student, I do work as consulting and engineering for various small businesses around me. I also write for [StorageReview](https://storagereview.com) occasionally. I have been using Linux full time since 7th grade, and my current distro of choice is [Arch Linux](https://archlinux.org) with LVM on LUKS. My daily driver is a FrameWork laptop, and I have a desktop computer with a Ryzen 2600X alongside 16G of RAM. These machines however are dwarfed in power by my homelab, which consists of a cluster of Raspberry Pis ;). My homelab is currently hosting my site, but it may move locations in the future, but that's for another post.

I also have hobbies outside of tech. I am a cuber, reader, language learner, and mathematics lover. I am teaching myself Spanish through [Refold](https://refold.la), of which I am a huge proponent. This topic also deserves its own post. I plan on writing here a lot, although, everyone says that.

I am also super excited to talk about the books I am reading. I mostly read fiction, primarily Sci-Fi and Fantasy. But I also read lots of non-fiction, ranging from the history of an obscure religion to how electronics work. I love learning and I will read anything that you put in front of me.

## Bye!

This is the end of my first blog post, I hope you enjoyed reading it.


"The shark that does not swims, drowns."

- Russian Proverb

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The Ridge Podcast

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