Rethinking Podcast Hosting

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been looking after the new station systems and working on putting together the replacement system for our self-hosted podcasts. For more details, read on.

In our last update, we were actively working on testing and deploying a new broadcast configuration which proved to be a bit more of a headache than it should have been. Ultimately, the system is out in production now, and we’re no longer broadcasting from our home studio, plus the station runs on an all-linux configuration with the same query-based playlisting system that our colocated system once ran. This was exactly what we’d hoped to accomplish. Now, there are a few loose threads to tie up such as the occasional missed live info update, but we’ll get that sorted out in due time.

One of the big things we still need to replace after pushing aside the previous system is our setup for self-hosted podcasts for Live and Meetup. We completed the creation of a new podcast feed generator which creates compliant feeds based on the Podcast Standards Project. Until now, neither of the hosting solutions we’ve used have produced a completely compliant feed which may have resulted in unexpected listing errors on podcast platforms in the past. Additionally, we’re continuing to test our new podcast hosting system. Once that’s working well, we will redeploy our feeds at which time episodes will become available once again.

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more news and music, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #199]