I prefer frozen and feed it to all my colubrids, but I feed live to my BP because it's what she takes.
As for bedding I personally dislike aspen (it works perfectly fine, I just personally don't like it) and use cypress mulch for my BP and newspaper for my colubrids. I also dislike cocofiber for anything but my frogs because it gets messy, but again plenty of people use it and it works fine. Like Deborah said, there are a lot of acceptable ways to feed and house your snakes, just figure out what works for you.