WordPress, Podcasting, and Changes

I’ve been using WordPress and Podpress to set up podcasting sites for almost 4 years now. I loved Podpress… it made it so easy for people without advanced tech skills to still be able to create a podcast of their own (or at least post it to their site and feed).

I stuck with it even during 2008 when there were no updates and the support forums would vanish without warning, partially out of loyalty to a good plugin (and Dan’s a really nice guy), and partially out of regret for my role in the addition of the Podango functionality to podpress.

The challenge is not finding another podcasting plugin to replace podpress — there are several out there that work just fine. The challenge is converting existing posts from using Podpress to using whatever the new plugin might be.

The other drawback is most if not all of the podpress users in my little enclave like the builtin podpress statistics… the instant gratification of seeing that your new episode has been downloaded 500 times within the first half hour of posting it can be addictive, and getting someone started on using a different stats tool can lead to frustration on both ends.

So this is the start of an experiment. I’m going to be testing out Powerpress from RawVoice (mostly because it will work in tandem with Podpress), and see if I can’t figure out a way to easily convert shows that have between 100-300 previous episodes out there.

I’m not in that big a rush, though. The main reason for my wanting to investigate other podcastin plugin options vanished mysteriously about a month ago. My error logs were bloated with podpress statcounts errors (the infamous duplicate entry for key 1 error), literally for a couple of years… until sometime within the past 4-6 weeks.

The errors just went stopped happening. I’m not sure if they upgraded MySQL or PHP on the server where my sites are, or exactly what happened… I do know that the recent Podpress 8.8.1 maintenance release wasn’t what fixed things, because I’ve only installed it on one site, as a test.

But, I continue to explore.