Skip to main content

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched GitMinutes, and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected!
Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there.

GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :)

Here are some of the things I learned during this last month:

Conceptually..

  • Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everything was a really good idea, and lowered the barrier for getting GitMinutes #01 out there. The first GitMinutes also sounds quite professional, and this is thanks to my practice in the sandbox.
  • I've gotten into the iTunes Store and Stitcher Radio, arguably the two most important places to be for expanding the audience. The trick was to first get the podcast rolling, and then get into these directories after 3-4 episodes are published.
  • Hand-picking my own guests was a good idea. I started off with a list of ten dream guests I wanted, and within a few days of asking, nine of these had agreed to do a show.
  • The first to agree doing a show was Randal L. Schwarz, and aside from being a great guest, he also promoted GitMinutes several times on his own podcast, FLOSS Weekly (which has a huge following). This definitely landed me a lot of listeners early on.
  • I used some of my recent parental leave to "subsidize" the time needed for launching the show, and this made it really easy to be available for the guests. Not sure how long I will be able to sustain the show after I go back to work this week though. I've recorded episode 8 now, and there might be a 9 and a 10, but beyond that it gets uncertain.

It needs to sound good

  • I've got a basic picture of the microphone landscape and options out there.
  • I've learned some things about audio mixing, inputs and outputs, file-formats, etc.
  • I've learned how to record good spoken audio.
  • Interviewing one other party across Skype (audio only) is a safe and good way to produce quality audio, but you need to have the guest do a local recording, in my humble opinion. She/he also needs to have a good microphone. I've gathered up the instructions for guests here.
  • I've learned how to edit and clean up audio in Audacity.
I talk more about some of these points in my own personal podcast episode about podcasting.

100% cloud!

  • I've figured out how to host resources and web-pages on my own domain in front of Amazon S3, also ran a couple of EC2 instances for fun.
  • Blogger with Feedburner is good enough for powering a podcast, but if you want a real podcast page, I've heard Wordpress - plus either the Podlove or the Powerpress plugin - is the way to go. Google could do with showing the podcasting world some more attention, but I doubt they see the business opportunities.
  • S3 is traffic-expensive, but depending on traffic it can be cheaper than the podcast-hosting alternatives out there - I've paid about 12$ for hosting 120 MB of podcasts, 120 GB of traffic. That would have cost me 15$ on LibSyn, or 20$ on Blubrry.
Now, regarding hosting, the nice thing about LibSyn and Blubrry is that they have a flat traffic rate. So if your podcast gets thousands of downloads a week, the price stays constant. However, I stuck with S3 because I didn't expect too much traffic, and whenever I stop podcasting, the cost of hosting will eventually drop to near-zero. 

How about the stats

  • I've configured access logs for S3 and fetched them using some snazzy Python scripts (also tried out the s3cmd command line tool, which is really nice). 
  • I've done some log analysis/web-traffic reports with Awstats.
  • Making sense of media download numbers is really hard, due to most clients doing partial downloads - this means that they download smaller chunks of an episode at a time. The problem is that pure mp3 downloads offer no JavaScript in the client for doing intelligent analysis like Google Analytics does.
  • I can however judge traffic over time, seeing how it increases per episode.
So, that's what I've figured out so far. Regardless of GitMinutes' future, I've learned a lot about this entire industry of podcasting that I knew so little about before. It's probably been one of the most orthogonal knowledge investments I've done since I started my programming career, and it has already given me quite a few ideas of future projects and possibilities.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant
6 comments
Read more

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some
Post a Comment
Read more

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --
12 comments
Read more

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o
Post a Comment
Read more

Leaving eyeo

Thirteen blog posts later, this one notes my departure from eyeo after 4 years and 3 months. I joined eyeo around the headcount of 80 employees, and now I think there's just over 250 people there. My role coming in was as operations manager, doing a mix of infrastructure engineering and technical project management. I later on took on organizational development to help the company deal with its growing pains . We introduced cross-functional teams, departments (kind of like guilds), new leadership structures, goal-setting frameworks, onboarding processes and career frameworks.  And all of this in a rapidly growing distributed company. I'm proud and happy that for a long time I knew every employee by name and got to meet every single new-hire through training them on company structure and processes.  At some point, we had enough experienced leaders and organizational developers that I could zoom back in on working in one team, consulting them on  Git and continuous integration
4 comments
Read more