phpBB Weekly

The phpBB Weekly website is back after a prolonged outage of nearly eight hours, during which the layout of our site was transitioned in preparation for our move to uStream. Although most of the changes were behind the scenes, there are a few new things to look at on the site. But first the important part…

Everyone who subscribes to the phpBB Weekly podcast feed needs to change their feed URL!

As before, the feed for the phpBB Weekly blog is still separate from the podcast feed. Our blog feed has not changed. Our new podcast feed, however, is as follows:
http://www.phpbbweekly.net/feed/podcast/

Starting with episode #119, that feed will contain the Enhanced AAC version of phpBB Weekly. Enhanced AAC is the preferred version because it will have a smaller filesize and some nice features like chapter markers and hyperlinks. However, Enhanced AAC is primarily compatible with QuickTime, iTunes, and other iDevices.

If Enhanced AAC is not desirable for you, we have an alternate feed that will continue to contain MP3 versions of the show:
http://www.phpbbweekly.net/feed/podcastmp3/

Read on for details on how to make this change in iTunes and other feed readers, and more on some of the other new features on our site.

To make this changeover in iTunes, go to the Advanced menu and choose Subscribe to Podcast, then paste the new feed URL in the window that appears. You can then unsubscribe from the old phpBB Weekly feed (any episodes that you have already downloaded will remain in iTunes even after you unsubscribe). Note that the new feed may redownload episode #118 if you change over before our next episode is released.

In any other feed reader/podcatcher, simply add a new feed with the URL. You can keep the old feed if you wish as no more episodes will be published there.

So what else is new? Well, here’s a brief rundown:

• Our site has been thoroughly deTalkShoeified! No more need to show off details on how to call into TalkShoe, since calling in is now a thing of the past.
• You don’t have to leave our website to participate in the show live anymore! Our new Live page lets you stream our live broadcast AND participate in our uStream chat room!
• The Participate page no longer exists. Of course, we still want listeners to participate, but the new Live page eliminated the need to go into details about how to dial in on TalkShoe or open up the chat room. In its place, there’s a new “Get Involved!” section of the sidebar which summarizes the main points from the Participate page in a few bullet points, and is a great way to find out the ways you can become an active part of the phpBB Weekly community.
• Speaking of which, our whole sidebar has gotten a nice facelift. The ways to subscribe to our show have been cleaned up and organized, we’ve pared out some links that we no longer think are relevant, etc. Plus that slow-to-load TalkShoe badge isn’t there anymore, obviously.
• Every single episode post on this site now lists the filesize, duration, and participants in the episode on the top of the feed. Going forward when we offer Enhanced AAC (M4A) versions, these will both be linked with their separate filesizes indicated. (The Flash player will continue to only play the MP3 version though for better compatibility.)
• The About page has been updated and expanded.
• The Promote page has also been expanded with ways that you can embed the uStream player and chat room to your websites, and how you can also embed a pop-out episode player that plays our published phpBB Weekly episodes to your site.

We have some more advanced features planned as well, which are planned to come in the next month or two:

• More advanced managing of future episodes, likely to include a Google Calendar integration or something of that nature.
• A more dynamic “Next Episode” badge on our home page that will include some automatic functionality for when the show is live.
• Some way of integrating phpBB Weekly’s Twitter feed more closely with our website.
• We just put together a new phpBB Weekly Facebook Fan page and are hoping to figure out ways to make it useful. Any Facebook experts out there have suggestions?

A couple of credits to mention that are helping to make this transition from TalkShoe possible:

• Our podcast media will now be hosted on Amazon’s S3 hosting service, which will allow for very high bandwidth uploads and downloads. A big thanks to David Lewis who is contributing the funding to make this possible.
• We are also going to be using a stats engine provided by the Tech Podcast Network, and we’re very grateful to them for providing this service. (Thought we’d forgotten about them, eh? We’re still a proud member of their network!)
• Our podcast feeds are being generated by the Blubrry PowerPress Plugin for WordPress. It’s an awesome plugin that has been a joy to use when setting it up today.

All right, that said, enjoy our renovated site, and enjoy the new streaming service and new formats coming to phpBB Weekly when we return from our break in a few weeks!