Changes at Nash Holos

It's been a long time since I blogged regularly here, during which time quite a bit has changed at Nash Holos, and for me personally.

Truth be known, I've missed blogging. Social media has its place, and it's great fun (most of the time). But blogging is a much better venue to engage with Nash Holos listeners and followers! Time will tell if I end up doing most of it here or at the Nash Holos website.

In my personal life, the biggest and most drastic changes have been the loss of my sister (cancer) and my mom, within less than a year of each other. As well I was away from home for several months so I could spend time with them in their final days.

It's been a rough couple of years.

But as they say in showbiz, the show must go on. And I made sure it did...as it has been for going on 30 years since the first incarnation of the show in 1990.

Over course of all those years, many things changed. Especially the technology! (Anyone remember reel-to-reel tapes? LOL)

For now, here's a rundown of the most recent and noticeable changes at Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio.

Ukrainian Food Flair

In 2015, we lost Sylvia Molnar to cancer. She had been with the show since the early 1990s.

It was a shock, and the beginning of a long stretch of personal loss and heartbreak for me.

Over the years Sylvia contributed more than 200 recipes, countless cooking tips and interesting anecdotes to the show since the early 1990s, on the series Ukrainian Food Flair.

From time to time you may hear the audio archives of Sylvia's Food Flair recordings. Just because she was such a big part of the show for so long.

I've been thinking about publishing Sylvia's recipes for some time now. As well as other recipes. Publishing comes with its own challenges, but, it may actually come to pass some day soon.

Meanwhile, I would love to bring back Ukrainian Food Flair to the Nash Holos airwaves in a fresh new format. If you have any suggestions or thoughts to share, please leave a comment below.

Nash Holos Nanaimo edition

• Introducing Oksana 

In May of 2016, Oksana Poberezhnyk joined me to host the second hour of the Nanaimo edition of Nash Holos in Ukrainian. She is a delight to work with and a natural on air. Her enthusiasm is contagious and she has many great ideas for improving the show going forward.

The Nanaimo edition airs Wednesdays on CHLY 101.7fm on the radio dial from11am-12pm with me (Pawlina) in English and from 12-1pm with Oksana in Ukrainian.

If you're not in Nanaimo (or even if you are), just for fun I suggest listening to the live stream (here) on CHLY's new online media player.

• Song/artist information now displays on player

A nifty new logging system for producers & presenters comes with an equally nifty bonus for listeners: it displays the artist and track title on the station's streaming online media player while the song is playing.

This is cutting edge technology in Radioland, and this feature will one day be ubiquitous across all radio stations and listening platforms. But at this time it's only available for the Nanaimo edition of Nash Holos, and only on the CHLY website live stream player. So if you have an FM radio player on your phone, or you're on your laptop, tablet or desktop, check it out here! And let me know how you like it.

If you can't catch the live broadcast or online stream, you can catch the podcast on Mixcloud, a very slick streaming site. (Here.)

New Distribution channels 

• RSS Feed

Nash Holos has had its own RSS feed for many years, and has had its share of growing pains along with all the changes in the technology itself.

Despite that RSS is considered old-school (largely because it has been around for over a decade), it actually has been evolving and keeping up with the times. It's especially useful with podcast listening apps, which are very mobile-friendly. (I personally use Podcast Addict for Android.)

If you are a podcaster yourself and are looking for a home for your podcast files, I highly recommend Pippa. It's a newcomer on the block but after checking out the options, I chose this one. It makes my life so much easier! No coding or "back-end" stuff  to worry about. Yay!!

Mixcloud offers only streaming, which seems to be the way things are going, as most seem to people prefer streaming to downloading these days. You can still download Nash Holos audio files here.

• iTunes

Until recently, the Nash Holos podcast link to iTunes has been an on-again off-again nightmare. Many reasons for that. Not least of all because I originally uploaded it, many years ago, as a manually-created xml file. (If you don't know what that means, consider yourself lucky).

I knew nothing at that time about coding, and even less now. So whenever it "broke" for reasons you have to know coding to figure out, I was lost. Now I no longer have to worry about it. For the iTunes link to the Nash Holos podcast, click here.

•  Mixcloud

If you follow Mixcloud to listen to podcasts, you can find the Nash Holos feed there. CHLY recently chose Mixcloud as a distribution for the station's program podcasts, and kindly included the Nash Holos feed rather than just the Nanaimo edition of the show.

So Mixcloud users can get both the Vancouver and Nanaimo editions there, as well as the "bonus" tracks of separate features like Ukrainian Jewish Heritage, Knyzhka Corner Book Reviews, etc.

And another bonus: Mixcloud is on Sonos! So if you have Sonos on your home sound system, you can get Nash Holos on it. Just make sure to follow Nash Holos on Mixcloud and it will appear on your Sonos.

To find and follow Nash Holos on Mixcloud, click here.

• YouTube

Several years ago now, someone recommended putting Nash Holos on YouTube because a lot of people actually access audio there. I liked the idea but found that it was just too time-consuming.

But now Pippa "automagically" posts each episode to the Nash Holos YouTube channel. 

You can find the Nash Holos YouTube channel here. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't yet!

Nash Holos Patreon Page

If you consider Nash Holos a valuable public service that is worth supporting financially, there is now a Patreon page where you can make a monthly pledge of $1 or more. Different tiers of support come with a variety "goodies" as tokens of appreciation for your support. For example, donors who pledge $5 or more get a free ebook of Ukrainian proverbs. (More to come!) You can find it here.

More changes coming, so stay tuned!

Other opportunities to support the show

It is definitely not a cliché that Nash Holos is "brought to you" by our sponsors and advertisers. It truly is, and I am eternally grateful for their support.

Particular thanks to Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, the Shevchenko Foundation, and Canada's National Ukrainian Festival, who have been regular supporters of the show for the past several years. Without their support, I would not have been able to pay the bills and keep Nash Holos on the air. 

So as a Nash Holos listener, please visit their websites and support them in turn whenever you can. And let them know you heard about them on Nash Holos!

If you happen to have an advertising budget for your business, professional service, or non-profit organization, please consider advertising on the show. You can also purchase advertising on behalf of your favourite Ukrainian charity or cultural non-profit that can't afford it themselves, so they can convey their message to Nash Holos listeners.

Another way to support the show is to use the Amazon (and other) affiliate links on the Nash Holos website/blog when shopping online. It will cost you absolutely nothing. Amazon will not charge you anything; the prices for things will always be the same whether you get to their site via a search engine or via an affiliate link. However they do pay a small commission as a reward for sending shoppers their way. So you can send a few cents to Nash Holos out of someone else's pocket simply by shopping at Amazon via a link on the Nash Holos website or here on this blog. ;)

Recipes page 

One last change I'll mention today, and it's here on this blog. If you haven't yet noticed, I've published a Recipe page which is available in the menu bar. The page consists of links to the recipes that have been posted here on this blog over the years. It's an index of sorts to make the recipes easier to access. I plan to add to the list, so you'll be seeing more activity here on the blog again.

To keep up with the changes, make sure to subscribe to the blog, bookmark it, or do whatever else to keep it on your radar!

Please leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts on any of these changes, or just about the show itself.