Paramagnus

Flash Update for Leopard Users

2007-11-07T01:01:36Z

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 Turns One!

2007-09-26T04:08:14Z

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!

Stats System Back Online

2007-09-20T07:42:00Z

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!

Completed Download Statistics Update

2007-09-19T07:14:00Z

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.

Completed Download Stats Delayed

2007-09-16T02:39:00Z

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!

Front Page Display Options

2007-09-12T03:28:17Z

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.

Podcast Spot Update: 8/26/2007

2007-08-26T16:02:38Z

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!

Interview with todbits.tv

2007-07-07T19:38:50Z

A couple of weeks ago Tod Maffin was in Edmonton to broadcast and record his video show, todbits.tv. I went down to the Hotel MacDonald to check it out, and it turns out I was the only one in Edmonton who went! What's the deal with that local tech people?!

Anyway, we couldn't get the live stream going, so we went outside to record it. Tod talked about his LG Cherry Chocolate phone, then we did a quick interview about Paramagnus and Podcast Spot.

You can watch the 12 minute video here. Thanks Tod!

Podcast Spot has iPhone support!

2007-06-30T04:26:00Z

Everyone is talking about the iPhone today, so why not us? Did you wait in line today for the iPhone? Being proud Canadians, we didn't - but we probably would have checked it out if we could have! Yes, even despite my comments about taking a "wait and see" approach.

If you are one of the lucky people who snagged an iPhone today, like the man pictured to the right, we have good news for you: Podcast Spot supports the iPhone! Actually, to be perfectly honest, we've supported it since May.

In the download menu of every episode page, there is an entry under "Mobile Phones" for the iPhone. Or you can subscribe too!

We make it dead simple for you as a podcaster to offer formats that will work on the hottest device around. Upload your media file using whatever format/codec is easiest for you to create, and we make sure it's converted properly for the iPhone (and a bunch of other devices too). Cool huh?

Happy iDay!

Where have we gone?

2007-06-24T08:11:03Z

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 :)

Update today!

2007-05-21T20:21:06Z

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 ;)

Podcast Spot Update: 4/7/2007

2007-04-08T01:43:24Z

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!

Podcast Spot Update

2007-04-07T20:38:49Z

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.

Clean & Hackable URLs

2007-03-20T23:24:39Z

Here's a post I made to my blog today that Podcast Spot users might find useful. Enjoy!

A week ago, Roland Tanglao reiterated his love for clean URLs. Or perhaps more accurately, his hatred of dirty (?) URLs. Here's what he wrote:

URLs with question marks, ampersands, etc should be banished to the Web 1.0 h*ll where they belong. I've been preaching the clean URL gospel for years but if I see one more WordPress blog with "?p" or one more Drupal site with "?q", I'll scream :-) Seriously if your webhost or your tech gal/guy can't figure out how to use clean URLs, find somebody else. It's 2007!

I couldn't agree more. Here's an example of what he means:

Dirty: http://example.com/articles.html?articleid=123&tag=rss
Clean: http://example.com/articles/123/rss

Clearly I prefer the second one, and I'm guessing you do too. I'm going to go one step further though, and say that not only should URLs be clean, they should be hackable! What does that mean? Let me give you an example:

http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes/FF7962/license
http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes/FF7962
http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes
http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com

The first link is for the licensing information of an episode. All you've got to do is "hack" off the end and you get the episode itself. One more hack and you get all the episodes. And finally, you're left with the entire podcast. It's pretty logical right? And it would be trivial to replace the episode ID with another one, or /episodes with /tags, etc. That's what I mean by hackable - they are easily modified to get you where you want to go.

Here's another example:

http://mastermaq.podcastspot.com/episodes/archive/2007/02/24

That will show you all episodes for February 24th, 2007. The URL is readable, and immediately you understand what it is doing. What if you want a different day? Replace 24 with something else. Just the month? Hack off the 24. You get the idea.

Clearly I am drinking the clean & hackable URLs koolaid, and as a result Podcast Spot has nothing but clean URLs. If you're working on a web project, consider doing the same - your users will thank you for it.

Northern Voice podcast was a success!

2007-03-05T19:40:26Z

Northern Voice 2007 happened a little over a week ago, and we were happy to be there podcasting the sessions. When all was said and done we had posted 36 episodes, including two interviews with Darren Barefoot from the organizing team. We learned a lot from the experience, including:

Getting video from the camera to the web is still relatively difficult (especially with just a laptop), despite tools like Windows Movie Maker.
Material to supplement the audio (such as a slide deck) would have been nice in a lot of cases.
Always have a schedule worked out in advance.
You can always improve the quality of your recordings!

Despite these and other lessons, it seems most people were pretty pleased with the podcast. We've received a bunch of comments from attendees and others, thanking us for making the recordings available. It was our pleasure!

Finally, I'll leave you with some stats about the podcast:

We posted 36 episodes
Combined, the episodes take up 7.83 GB of storage space (including all the conversions)
If you were to listen to every episode, it would take 26 hours, 7 minutes, and 13 seconds
The average episode length is 43 minutes, 32 seconds