I've had a few people ask me how I created the screencast I posted yesterday - it turns out that the first thing I did was what I stayed with. First, I hunted around and found CamStudio via Jon Udell. From there I recorded the screencast that's up now - but not in it's final form. The avi output was about 100 MB - way too big for my taste. I tried producing an swf with CamStudio, but the quality was pretty poor. From there, I found Windows media Encoder. That's a free download, but it produces Windows specific media files (wmv). As well, I wasn't happy with the video quality - the screens were all jaggy. What I finally did was use Media Encoder's transformation capabilities - it read in the avi file and pushed out a 9 mb wmv - and I was happy with the quality of that. In the end, I posted the very first crack I took at the cast.

I'm planning to do another one, picking up where I left off - and walking through the creation of a script that BottomFeeder will run periodically, creating a local RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Stay tuned.