Sparkcasting.com Site Upgrade - 0.2
It's so strange being home.. really. I've been on the road so much lately it almost feels uneasy being back in NYC. But, as usual, there's never time for rest.
Tonight, to the best of my knowledge, Channel 5 (KPIX) will be airing their piece on Podcasting. I did a good interview with them a couple of weeks ago and I'm suspecting that it will get included in this piece. Naturally, this created a new pressure point for me - the site.
When I did the interview, they were zoomed in on the site for a few parts. Of course, it wasn't the site, just the local development version I was running (the production site was a sliver of what was planned). Well, it's one step closer today.
I've been working mostly on getting the legacy stuff over (never thought I would be the owner of legacy data). In any event, the previous Beercasts have finally been imported and the site migrated to run on the database.
So what's new in this version?
New Home Page - I was forced to throw up a simple page before with just a screenshot. Now, that screenshot has been replaced with the real thing.
This page has a lot going on, so I'll name the sections. The right column has a listing of the Recent Casts and Recent Shows. Midway through the page is a listing of the next 3 events. Further down are the more recent news items.
Show Home Pages - Previously, the shows were hosted on their own pages, but it was quite annoying to deal with to tell the truth. I've moved to something that I think is a lot easier to use (and easy on the eyes).
Down the left, you'll find the summary of the show. The middle column has a listing of the topics. Clicking on a topic title shows the SparkCasts associated with that topic for the episode. The right column has a navigator to move through episodes of the show as well as links to RSS feeds for both the show and the topic being viewed.
One nice thing is that now each episode has its own URL. This will make linking to an episode really easy. They all follow the format - http://sparkcasting.com/shows/[showAlias]/episodes/[episodeID]
Show Guides - RSS - If you're interested in knowing when a show gets updated, that's simpler than ever. Each show has it's own RSS feed that contains each of the episodes associated with that show. Subscribe away!
Episode Guides - Playlist - If you've wanted to listen to everything from a specific episode, it's pretty simple to do now. Each episode has a M3U playlist located in the root.
For example, http://sparkcasting.com/shows/nyc-squad/episodes/3/index.m3u will give you all the casts for Episode 3.
Topic Cards - RSS - SparkCasting is a topic-centric talk show. As a result, we're more than happy to see our topics shared with others. To make this easier, we're making it quite simple to get a hold of the full data for a topic.
If you are looking for the Topic Card, you can point your browser to http://sparkcasting.com/topics/[topicID]/index.xml
Topic Guides - RSS - This was the promise all along with this system. The idea is that you can build your own show by subscribing to the TOPICS that you like. You don't have to like an entire show, unless you really do ;)
The Topic RSS feeds now are connected and contain a blend of the casts that cover the topic across shows. Previously, they only listed the casts from the specific show. To get a Topic Feed, you simply point your browser to http://sparkcasting.com/topics/[topicID]/recent.casts.xml
Well, there's a ton more to come, but that's what I got done in the last few days. Version 0.3 will most likely be up some time next week. Have to get some old new shows posted first.