phpBB Weekly

That’s right. I’m sure that many people would respond to that title saying, “Finally!” Personally I’m having a hard time believing it. Interestingly enough, the only reason phpBB Weekly exists is because one day, about a month or two after I’d discovered TalkShoe, I decided that I wanted to try out their whole “talkcast” thing, and thus phpBB Weekly was born. However, a lot has changed since the day when phpBB Weekly was just me planning to answer questions from people calling in wanting help with phpBB (which never materialized, actually), where TalkShoe handled all of the recording and all that. Now we discuss stuff in great detail on the show, we record and edit locally in relatively high quality (compared to TalkShoe), we have guests joining us frequently, we have a very active and contributive chat room that listens live, and we’ve frequently had lots of people asking us to switch from TalkShoe to something better. After doing some research and tests this past week, I’d say we’ve finally found phpBB Weekly’s successor to TalkShoe: uStream.

Just Give Me a Quick Summary:

• This morning’s episode #118 was our last episode ever on TalkShoe. Beginning with phpBB Weekly #120 on Saturday, August 29, we will be streaming live on uStream. (Episode #119 will be a non-live episode released sometime during our two-week break.)
• We will be launching a new podcast feed managed here on phpBBWeekly.net, replacing the previous feed. All subscribers will need to update their feed URLs at that time to continue receiving our episodes! Details of this changeover will be announced when it is implemented in the next two weeks.
• Our website, phpBBWeekly.net, will be taken down on Wednesday, August 12, starting at 11 AM EDT (1500 UTC) for downtime to reorganize the site to reflect our change to uStream and our time change to 1 PM Eastern.

whoStream?
uStream! You probably best know it as the popular site for streaming video. As such, it has a very reliable, compatible, high-quality streaming architecture, and in a public test we ran this week, a number of our listeners who have routinely been unable to connect to TalkShoe’s web client were able to easily participate on uStream. The audio is much higher quality and has less lag than the streaming audio with TalkShoe.

Wait, you’re turning this into a video podcast?
NO! Not only did the poll we ran this week decisively say that listeners don’t want video, but we don’t have the technical setup to make that feasible at this point, nor is there much need. This quote probably sums it up best. Of course, having the video option available doesn’t rule out the occasional exception, but for the most part, we will be streaming audio only.

So, how do I get to participate?
Well, you can’t call in live anymore. That whole “call us at (724) 444-7444, call ID #12418″ thing is over; no one has done it in well over a year anyway. However, in addition to you being able to check out our phpBB Weekly uStream channel page, we will also be able to embed the live stream and uStream chat room right here on phpBBWeekly.net!
As far as I know, you have to be logged in to uStream in order to participate in the chat. Fortunately, uStream supports OpenID, so if you have a Google account, Facebook account, or an account on any other OpenID-supported site, simply log in that way and bypass any kind of registration form for uStream, and you’re good to go! (Or just register with uStream, it’s very painless.) If there is a way to open up the chat room to guests that you know of, please let us know.
Plus, the uStream chat room is open 24/7, so you could make a comment in there right now if you want! (Our episode chat logs will be restricted to including only conversation that takes place while we’re actually “on the air.”)

Does that mean you’ll be recording stuff with uStream?
NO! We’re still going to be recording and editing the shows locally. Guests will still join us on a Skype conference call, just as we have been doing. uStream will purely be our streaming method and will not be used to record anything. The only exception is if we ever do a video episode for whatever reason, in which case the video will be recorded by uStream and be viewable only from uStream; we do not intend to spend time editing video for this show at this time.

You’re leaving TalkShoe, but the phpBB Weekly podcast feed is handled by TalkShoe. Is that changing too?
Yes! This is a really important point. This morning’s episode #118 will be the last episode appearing on the current feed hosted by TalkShoe. Going forward, we will be launching our own podcast feed hosted here on phpBBWeekly.net, and will begin hosting our podcast media on Amazon S3. What are some of the benefits?

• Amazon S3 service will have far superior bandwidth to TalkShoe, meaning that you’ll be able to download the episodes as fast as your internet connection can support it. (Maybe it’ll even help get the episodes out faster too…)
• Starting with episode #119, we’re going to be releasing phpBB Weekly episodes in two formats. In addition to the MP3 format, we will also be providing an Enhanced AAC podcast, which will have a much smaller filesize (about 60% slimmer than MP3) and include chapter markers, changeable album artwork, and embedded hyperlinks in the album artwork, which will help provide much more context to our episodes. (The downside: Enhanced AAC podcasts are primarily only supported in iTunes, so we’ll continue to produce the more widely compatible MP3 version as well.)

Details about the feed changeover will be posted this week once the new feed is active; there will also be a short reminder episode recorded on the TalkShoe feed to remind subscribers to change over. It may take some time for podcast directories (like iTunes) to fully recognize the new feed, hence why we’re doing this change during our summer break.

So how are you transitioning over?
phpBBWeekly.net will be taken down this Wednesday, August 12 starting at 11 AM EDT (1500 UTC). This downtime will allow us to rewrite the portions of the site pertaining to TalkShoe, replacing them with the corresponding instructions for uStream. It will also allow us to build the new podcast feed and replace all of the existing episode download links on TalkShoe with the new ones from Amazon S3. (Moving 118 episodes around is no easy trick, we already started getting this move going two days ago!)

Conclusion
This is a major step forward for phpBB Weekly. Periods of change and transition are never easy, and we’re getting ready to deal with more than a couple of simultaneous changes and transitions over the next few weeks. Thank you for your patience, understanding, and support as we work to regain our footing over the next few weeks. I’m sure that these changes are going to help set us up for the next few years of great phpBB discussion and coverage on the show. If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below.