You know, phpBB Weekly is no longer the young, fledgling, relatively-unknown podcast that it once was. This show is now almost seventeen months old, and we’ve got more than sixty episodes behind our belt, most of which have some outstanding content, whether it be tutorials, interviews, news coverage, or just random jibber jabber. However, because a lot of what we talk about is timeless–as relevant now as it was when we recorded it–we’ve been wanting to come up with a way to spotlight our past episodes, giving our long-time listeners a way to rediscover them, and our newer listeners a way to discover them for the first time.
And so, after a lot of work that I’ve gone through sorting, organizing, and linking, I’m excited to announce the introduction of the phpBB Weekly Zeitgeist! Ignoring the weird cool name, the Zeitgeist is essentially a grouping of our past episodes organized into different categories, so that you can discover past episodes that are of interest to you.
Of course, this is the first time I’ve tried doing something like this, so if you have any feedback, please feel free to let us know in the comments section of this topic. We hope that this will be useful to you.
Today marks a very special milestone for phpBB Weekly (for any podcast, actually): our fiftieth episode! To celebrate, we bring you an interview that Douglas has been looking forward to for ten months. Patrick O’Keefe, the administrator of the iFroggy Network and phpBBHacks.com, joins us for a very interesting discussion.
During the interview, Patrick talks about phpBBHacks.com, including how and why it was started back in 2001 (yeah, it predates phpBB2!), and how it has grown and expanded in its seven year history. We also take an unbiased look at some of the differences between phpBBHacks.com and the phpBB.com MOD Database, and how phpBBHacks.com has become one of the most popular third-party phpBB sites on the internet (well, according to Google, anyway). He also talks a bit about his two websites for community administrators: ManagingCommunities.com (a blog) and CommunityAdmins.com (a community for communities). Finally, he tells us about his new book, Managing Online Forums, coming in late April. We will be reviewing his book on a future episode of phpBB Weekly, as well as giving away a copy! Stay tuned for more details on that.
David also answers a question in the TalkShoe chat room revealing that Ascraeus will feature the much-requested RSS Syndication feature built-in. We briefly talk about the significance of that feature addition.
And at the end of the show, David gives us his exclusive ski tips, based on the bloopers he endured earlier this week.
David is away on this episode (and will probably be away on episode #046 as well) as he goes through the necessary steps of his move to Spokane, Washington. However, on this Year in Review episode, Douglas walks through all of the major announcements and events that took place for phpBB during the year 2007, including all of the beta and RC releases, the website outages, prosilver, the Community Choice Awards, MOD Team announcements, and of course, the 3.0.0 release. He also looks ahead into the year 2008 and pinpoints some of the things that we can expect to come down the road in the next few months.
In addition, the latest update on what has been going on with Douglas’ whole webhost fiasco and a final recap of the year 2007 for phpBB Weekly are also provided.
Hello everyone!
I am really excited to be able to announce that after being down for 18 days, phpBBWeekly.net is back online!
On December 4th, something happened to my cPanel username/password causing them to change. I’m not sure what happened to cause the change, but I certainly had nothing to do with it.
So why did it take 18 days for the site to come back up? Well, I had bombarded my web host for weeks with support requests, and never got a response. Yesterday, I finally got angry enough about it that I did a WHOIS on my host’s domain name, found a phone number, called them up, and found out that my host strangely still had my old Mac.com e-mail address on file–an e-mail address which expired five months ago. (Their policy–which is a good one–is to only accept support requests from the e-mail address which they have on file, for security reasons.) So, once the guy on the phone updated the e-mail address I had on file, my support request got a response, and my username and password got reset, and now the site is back online.
So, I guess I do kind of owe my web host, Kazix.com, an apology, because I had honestly started telling people that they had packed up shop and left town. That wasn’t the case at all–just a bit of a miscommunication, which caused the outage of the past 18 days.
Anyway, phpBB Weekly episodes #042 and #043 will be posted on here shortly, and then hopefully we can move on from all of this. I’ll just consider the fact that the site is finally back up a nice little early Christmas present.
Again, I’m very sorry for the outage and tried everything I could to get it out of the way ASAP. Thanks for continuing to stick around with phpBB Weekly!
–-Douglas Bell
A lot of weird stuff has been happening around the phpBB community this past week, most of which is the fault of the phpBB team members. First, all of the team members in an over-obvious ploy turned all of their avatars into weird-looking gold replicas (King Midas must have visited phpBB.com!), then David puts all kind of weird encrypted messages on Star Trek Guide leading to this video (passcode: goldday), and now we have a countdown which doesn’t count down to the final release, but counts down to the time when the phpBB teams will tell us when the final release will be, thus enabling us to start the countdown to the final release, etc.
Unfortunately, Douglas doesn’t like suspense, and so the disputes between himself and David during the past week come to a peak as Douglas interrogates David and the other team members on the live show about how crazy they are to pull off all these shenanigans, and in particular David for pulling off his own miniature MacHeist.
In other news, the phpBB Weekly website has been down since Tuesday, and it’s completely the fault of Douglas’ webhost, which has not been responding to his persistent e-mails. As Douglas tries more drastic actions, he asks the phpBB Weekly listeners to chip in and send e-mails to his webhost to see if we can get their attention so Douglas can regain access to phpBBWeekly.net. Please see this forum topic for more info and the latest updates on the situation.
The MOD of the Week is Ajax Shoutbox for phpBB3 by Paul (incidentally, Paul has a test board; username/password is “tester” without quotes), and the Style of the Week is Christmas Style by Kber. We’d still love for listeners to recommend their favorite MODs and Styles to us for consideration on future phpBB Weekly episodes.
Please be sure to join us next week, December 15th, when we will be joined by Johan Jannsens, the project manager and lead developer of Joomla! This will be an exciting episode where we will get to learn a bit about some exciting post-Olympus-release events coming up in phpBB’s near future, plus it will be our last episode before we go on holiday break.
The special intro music for this episode is Also Sprach Zarathustra by Deodato, which was specially picked to commemorate the countdown for phpBB 3.0.0 (and is not going to be our new theme music, don’t worry).
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phpBB Weekly is a live podcast that covers the latest news on the phpBB forum software, including various tips and tutorials on using phpBB as a user and as an administrator, and highlighting various MODs and Styles that are available for phpBB on the web today. The show is hosted by Douglas Bell and David Lewis.
On this website, you can listen to the past episodes of phpBB Weekly, find show notes for all of the previous shows, and find out information about upcoming episodes. You should also check out our phpBB Weekly forum.
The badge below also lets you quickly load past episodes of phpBB Weekly, or listen to episodes live when they are recorded most Saturdays at 12:00 PM EDT (16:00 UTC). See the About page to learn more about the show, and also learn you can participate with the show.
