Some of you have updated to Mac OS X 10.5 (aka "Leopard") and found that you could no longer upload episodes to your podcast! Turns out this is a bug with the Flash player for the Mac. We've been looking into it, and found the following knowledge base article from Adobe:

File upload using FileReference.upload fails in Leopard. End users are unable to browse to the file to upload.

That's the problem! They have posted an update for the Flash player which you can download here. Keep in mind that this is not the final version, so you may encounter other issues still.

For more information, check out this blog post from Adobe's Peter deHaan.

If anything else comes up, we'll let you know.

Podcast Spot launched a year ago today, if you can believe it! I still can't. It's been an interesting year, to say the least. We'd like to say thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last twelve months, and especially to all the podcasters who call Podcast Spot home. You're the reason we're here!

We have lots of plans and ideas for Podcast Spot, so I have no doubt that our second year will be even better than the first. If you have any feedback or suggestions, we're always eager to hear from you.

Thanks again, and happy podcasting!

The stats system is now back online so you can expect your completed download stats to appear or catch up. We've done a lot of testing to make sure the system is stable and fast (and bug-free) but if you notice anything that doesn't seem right, please let us know by posting to the forums or emailing us.

This is the first update towards rehauling the statistics. More to come soon!

We should now be up to date on completed download statistics but you can still expect future statistics to be delayed. We've found a glitch that is causing some noise with the rest of the system so we have turned the stats system back off until it can be fixed.

We expect to have this resolved by Thursday or Friday. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We're overhauling the way we process completed downloads and as we transition to the new system, we need to turn off processing for a day or two. As such, you'll find your completed downloads unusually low but don't worry, we're still keeping track of them and they'll show up once we turn the system back on. Your attempted downloads will not be affected.

The new system will allow for more real-time completed download statistics (up to the hour) as well as improved accuracy.

This is one of the many updates that will be coming to your statistics over the next few weeks so stay tuned!

Tonight we deployed a relatively small, but useful feature. Instead of being forced to show the two latest episodes on the front page of your podcast site, you now have some options! You can choose from the following:

• Display the 2 most recent episodes (default)
• Display the 5 most recent episodes
• Display the 10 most recent episodes
• Display episodes from the last seven days
• Display episodes from the last fourteen days
• Display episodes from the last thirty days

For more information, check out this thread on the forums.

We also updated our release history page which was horribly out of date.

Yesterday evening we undertook the very daunting task of moving our servers to a new location. If you experienced any down time as a result, please accept our apologies! We did our best to ensure that Podcast Spot was still up and running throughout the move, but I know there was an hour or two where that didn't happen. Please note we did intentionally turn off the Admin site however, and we made the system read-only until the move was completed.

Everything was fully up and running at the new location around 2 AM last night. All things considered, the move went quite well! We will continue to run both locations for a little while, as we did change some DNS information and it sometimes takes longer than we'd like to propogate. That said, the old location will remain in read-only mode, meaning you cannot add or update episodes. This shouldn't be a problem - everything happens automatically and you shouldn't have to do anything special to connect to the new location, but if you are still having problems, email us at support@paramagnus.com.

You might be wondering why we decided to move. There are a number of reasons, but the main ones are reliability and performance. Our servers are in a proper data centre now, on faster connections than we had previously. Podcast Spot should now run better than ever!

We've got more good stuff on the way too, feature-wise. Stay tuned!

We're still here! We had a small hiccup with the site tonight (lasted about 20 minutes or so) and after everything was fixed, I realized that we haven't updated this blog in a very long time - our apologies for that!

We haven't disappeared, and we haven't stopped improving Podcast Spot. In fact, we've released a number of small improvements over the last month! We normally release updates in a big bunch, which is why we make an "update" post, but that doesn't work when you have small things appearing every few days. Perhaps we'll revisit this - maybe we should integrate and use Twitter more? It's great for small bits of information.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know we're still around :)

We're going to be pushing out an update to Podcast Spot this afternoon/early evening, so don't worry if you see us disappear for a moment or two! Most of the changes in this update are backend items which will make Podcast Spot work even better than before.

We'll update our status on Twitter if you'd like to know right down to the second what we're up to ;)

As you may have noticed, we published a new update to Podcast Spot this afternoon. We're still working out a few behind-the-scenes kinks, but it looks good otherwise! Here is the release history. You could sort of call this update the "conversion" update, because we made a bunch of changes related to media formats. Notably:

• Audio files are no longer converted straight to 96 kbps - like video, all conversions are now relative. The higher the quality of your original, the higher the quality of our conversions.
• We now treat MP4 and MOV as kind of the same thing. If you upload a WMV file, we'll convert to MP4. Upload an MOV however, and we won't do an unnecessary conversion.
• We also added 3GP to our conversions, so all new videos will be able to take advantage of the conversion. Perfect for watching on mobile phones!
• MPEG-1 has been dropped as a conversion format. Existing files are still accessible, but new videos will not be converted to MPEG-1.

There's some other new stuff, such as a river of news, and an all-new interface for the Admin.

If you find any problems, please let us know. Enjoy!

We're updating Podcast Spot this afternoon, so the site will be down for an hour or so. Then we'll be back, better than ever! I'll post an update with our new features shortly.

Want to keep up to date on our status? Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/podcastspot.

Over the last few weeks we've deployed a number of updates to Podcast Spot, including a bunch of new features. You can see our release history page for details, but here's a few highlights:

Completed Download Statistics
We've been tracking attempted downloads since our September launch, and in November we started tracking completed downloads. What's the difference? An attempted download occurs when someone (or some application, like iTunes) makes a request to download an episode. A completed download is counted only when that entire episode has been sent in its entirety. As of today, you can now see how many completed downloads you have in the Admin. We've also added a handy graph that compares attempted and completed downloads for today, yesterday, this week, and last week.

Custom Domains
Another new feature is the ability to use your own domain name for your podcast. Instead of "paramagnus.podcastspot.com" for example, we could use "podcast.paramagnus.com". And the best part? You can have up to five custom domains!

Themes
Themes are a handy way to personalize your podcast. Instead of our default white look, you can choose from a number of colorful themes. We're going to let you customize these even further in a future update, so stay tuned!

Other Updates
We've also updated a bunch of other things, such as the flash players, show notes editor, and the conversion service. There's some exciting things on tap too.

We would love to hear what you think about the new features and updates. As always, if you encounter any problems, or if you have any suggestions or other feedback, don't hesitate to contact us.

We published a new update for Podcast Spot earlier this evening! This one fixes a few issues and adds some cool new features, including custom domains (for example, podcast.yourname.com) and themes. You can take a look at the release history for more information.

February is going to be a busy month for Podcast Spot! We've got lots of new stuff on tap, and of course, Northern Voice. Stay tuned!

Just a quick test, please ignore.