PodHawk Podcasting to the world!

...to PodHawk.

PodHawk is a content management system specially designed for audio and video podcasters. Developed from the well-established LoudBlog software, PodHawk will manage your audio and video files, generate a full podcasting RSS feed, and allow you to present your postings on an attractive web-page. There is a choice of Flash players, so your listeners can listen to your masterworks straight from your site.

This site runs entirely on PodHawk, and shows a few of the things that PodHawk is capable of doing. You can read much more about PodHawk here, and download PodHawk 1.62 here.

Photo of a red-tailed hawk by Vicki’s Nature/flickr

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I hope to release PodHawk 1.7 before the end of July. Main features will be :

• a plugins architecture, which will make it easier to add optional new features to PodHawk without rewriting the core code, plus a first small group of plugins.
• support for the latest version (5.2) of the JW Player, and the new .zip based themes for the JW Player
• the PodHawk facility to send a tweet to Twitter whenever a new post goes on air will be rewritten to use “open authentication”. This is essential, as in mid-August Twitter will stop support for the “basic authorisation” procedure used in PodHawk 1.6.

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I have today released PodHawk 1.62.

The main changes from PodHawk 1.61 are:

• The Facebook option now supports the new Facebook authorisation process. Existing users who have a Facebook application running off PodHawk need to upgrade as the old authorisation process will cease to work after the end of June 2010. There are, alas, two extra fields to complete in the Facebook section of the “settings” page – blame Facebook, not me!
• The Facebook canvas page and the app tab now support paging – there are next page/previous page links so that users can page through your podcasts.
• In recording page 2, you now have an option to classify a post as “iTunes explicit” even if your feed as a whole is not classified as “explicit” (explicit = drugs, sex or bad language!)
• There are also a few bug fixes, including fixes to the counting scripts to deal with the problem of phantom downloads; and a new directory podhawk/helperapps which you need ONLY if you are running PodHawk on a Windows server – see howtoupdate.txt in the download package.

Happy podcasting!

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I have released PodHawk 1.61 today. There are no new features. The missing files in the facebook directory have been restored, and I have taken the opportunity to fix a small number of other bugs which users have been kind enough to tell me about.

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I have released PodHawk 1.6 today. Download here.

New features include :

Facebook integration. Optionally, you can put your PodHawk site on Facebook as a Facebook application. Your users can add your podcasts to their profiles, and put your mp3 files in their News Feed for their friends to listen to. Full details here.

Flash file uploading (in place of the old php browser upload). If your server is set up to read “php_value” directives in .htaccess files, your PodHawk upload limit is now 50MB. Details here.

A new feature for compiling audio/video playlists and playing them in the JW player on your web page. See the example on this site. Details here.

A newly-designed calendar plugin for your webpage which uses cunning AJAX technology to move from month to month (instead of reloading the webpage).

Plus many more minor enhancements and a few bug fixes.

PodHawk 1.6 requires php5. If your server has php4, you should install PodHawk 1.53 instead.

Full install/upgrade/convert from LoudBlog instructions are included in the .zip and .tar.gz packages.

Future plans for PodHawk include support for file hosting on Amazon SSS (this is possible at present, but could be made more useable); and a JavaScript API to allow material from your PodHawk site to display on other CMSs such as Drupal and Joomla. Other suggestions welcome. Happy podcasting!

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