PodHawk

Welcome...

Peter Carter — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:49:00 +0000

...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

PodHawk 1_7 released

Peter Carter — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:49:00 +0100

PodHawk 1_7 was released today. You can download it from SourceForge.

The main new features are:

a plugins archticture. PodHawk 1_7 ships with a small group of plugins which you can use
- to ping weblog services and send a tweet to Twitter when a new post goes on air;
- make PDFs from your postings;
- permit Ogg audio and video files to be played on your website;
- place ShareThis, Facebook, Digg etc links on your posts;
- truncate postings (with ‘...read more' links) on multi post pages
This is just a start. More plugins are planned.
improved security – PodHawk no longer requires any directories to have ‘world-writeable' (0777) permissions. Read this for details.
support for the latest version (version 5.2) of the JW audio and video player, and the new .zip skins for the player
an improved install programme
plus a number of bug-fixes

Progress on PodHawk 1.7

Peter Carter — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 21:25:00 +0100

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.

PodHawk 1.62 released

Peter Carter — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:44:00 +0100

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!

PodHawk 1.61 released

Peter Carter — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:03:00 +0100

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.

PodHawk 1.6 released.

Peter Carter — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:07:00 +0000

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!

PodHawk 1.53 released

Peter Carter — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:58:00 +0000

PodHawk 1.53 has been released today. This is a minor bug-fix release. Instructions for installing or updating are included in the zip file.

PodHawk 1.6 will be released in the next week or two. It will require php5. If your server has php4, you should install/upgrade to PodHawk 1.53 and not PodHawk 1.6.

A PodHawk playlist

Peter Carter — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:27:00 +0000

PodHawk 1.6 contains a playlist manager. You can compile a playlist from any of your postings and play it in the JW player. Supported file formats are mp3, mp4, flv and YouTube videos, and files can be hosted locally on your own site or remotely. PodHawk can update your playlist automatically whenever you create a new posting.

This playlist contains a selection of postings in various formats on this site.

File download (0:00 mins | 0 MB)

PodHawk 1.52 released

Peter Carter — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:34:00 +0000

PodHawk 1.52 was released today. You can download it as a .zip or a .tar.gz archive here. The archive contains instructions (howtoupdate.txt) on how to update from earlier PodHawk versions.

This is principally a bugfix release. In particular, I have traced and corrected the bug which placed three invisible invalid characters at the beginning of the RSS feed. There is also a new theme (Black Urban) for you to try. You can customise the links at the top of the Black Urban page by simple editing of podhawk/custom/themes/black_urban/index.tpl.

Future plans for PodHawk include Facebook integration, so that your podcasts can be displayed in your Facebook profile, complete with players so that your friends can listen to them; a Flash uploader for file uploading; and a facility for creating and managing playlists. I propose to drop browser file upload (which can only be used for small files) and the CGI uploader; and also support for QuickTime , subject of course to any comments which users may have.

YouTube Video

Peter Carter — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:22:00 +0000

This is PodHawk with a YouTube video.

File download (0:00 mins | 0 MB)

PodHawk 1.51 released

Peter Carter — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:23:00 +0000

PodHawk 1.51 was released today and can be downloaded from Sourceforge. This is a bug-fix release with no significant new features.

PodHawk 1.5 released

Peter Carter — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:20:00 +0000

PodHawk 1.5 was released today. You can download it here. The download package contains instructions on how to install Podhawk, and how to update from PodHawk 1.4.

New features include :

URL rewriting. For example, instead of www.mypodhawksite.com/index.php?cat=music, your listeners can now ask for www.mypodhawksite.com/music. Further details in the PodHawk wiki.
Option to send a tweet to your followers on Twitter whenever you put a new posting on air.
Option to include Share This links on your posts.
A new system for counting downloads. PodHawk can now count plays of mp4 and flash videos from the JW player on your site; previously it could count only plays of mp3s.
thumbnail images in the images manager
Option to populate home page with posts from a single category, instead of from all categories

The big changes however are under the bonnet. Large parts of the coding have been rewritten to make PodHawk more secure against sql injection, cross-site request forgeries and other nasty stuff. Again, fuller details are in the Wiki. I have also replaced Adodb (the programme which handles database transactions in PodHawk) with adodb-lite, which uses smaller resources on your server.

Please update your PodHawk site as soon as possible to benefit from the important security enhancements in PodHawk 1.5.

PodHawk 1.5 will be the last release to support php4. Most php servers today run php5, and php6 will be available soon. If your server still runs php4, tell your web host or server administrator that it is time to upgrade!

Security

Peter Carter — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:16:00 +0100

You may have seen some recent reports about successful hacker attacks against WordPress sites.

PodHawk users may find the following helpful in making their sites as secure as possible:

There is no substitute for a strong password. There are several online facilities which will test your password for you and tell you how strong it is.
PodHawk allows you to have a login name (to access your admin pages) which is different from your ‘nickname' or screen name. Your screen name can be read by anyone who visits your webpage. Make sure that you set a completely different login name.
Turn off error messaging (admin settings page). Error messages contain information about the structure of your site. You can always turn error messaging on again temporarily if you encounter a problem.
Protect your configuration file by adding the following little .htaccess file in your podhawk/custom directory.
<Files config.php> Order deny,allow deny from all </Files>
Test it by using your browser to navigate to [yoursite]/podhawk/custom/config.php. You should get an “access denied” error.
The commenting system is an obvious possible route for an attempted SQL injection attack. If you use the Disqus commenting system, the problem belongs to Disqus, not you, as comments are not entered in your database. If you use Akismet, turn off the facility to store spam messages for 14 days. Most comment spam is simply an attempt to insert a link to a porno site in your post, but some may also contain an attempt at malicious code. Don't take the risk of entering it on your database.
Don't enter any data about your ftp username, password etc in the ftp section of the settings page unless you want to use the Java Applet to upload your audio files. This information has to be stored in unencrypted form in the database, so someone who successfully hacked your site would have access to your ftp settings as well.
SQL injection attacks may rely on the attacker knowing the names of the tables in your database. If you are making a new install of PodHawk, the installation programme allows you to insert a ‘database prefix' (ie a string of letters or numbers which will precede the ‘proper' name of the table). Originally, the idea was to allow you to run more than one PodHawk installation off the same database. But the database prefix can also be a valuable security tool. Without a database prefix, a hacker will know that all your database tables have names which look like “lb_tablename”. If you set a datbase prefix of, say, “jvx37pv_”, the tablenames will look like this “jvx37pv_lb_tablename”, which a hacker is unlikely to be able to guess. So, set a secure database prefix if you are installing PodHawk for the first time.
Can you retrofit a database prefix to an existing PodHawk database? Yes, with all the usual warnings about backing up everything first. The SQL command you want has the form
RENAME TABLE tablename TO newtablename
Use SQLMyAdmin to run the command; then add the new prefix in the following line in your config.php file.
"pref" => "[insert your new prefix here]". Don't forget that the ‘lb_' bit is part of the database name and must be preserved in the new name. If you have a second database user, you will need to change that user's permissions to refer to the new table names.

UPDATE Podhawk 1.5 contains security enhancements which overtake many of the points in this posting. Details here.

PodHawk SVN Repository

Peter Carter — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:07:00 +0100

I have now activated the PodHawk Subversion repository in SourceForge.net and uploaded the provisional code for PodHawk 1.5. You can checkout a copy from the terminal:

svn co https://podhawk.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/podhawk podhawk

or browse the code here.

I hope to release PodHawk 1.5 in a few weeks time.

How to make cakes ....

Peter Carter — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:53:00 +0100

PodHawk supports the JW Player from LongTail video. The player will play Flash videos (.flv), mp4 files with H264 encoding, You Tube videos and playlists, and streaming video.

For licensing reasons, the JW Player is not bundled with PodHawk. You have to download it separately from the longTail Video site. This is a very simple operation – full instructions in the PodHawk Wiki.

This is a little video that I made some years ago. It is an mp4 video, hosted on the PodHawk site.

If you are viewing this in the default theme, you will see that the JW player runs off the right hand side of the page. If you want to use this theme with video files, you will need to resize the player – easy to do in the admin (backend) pages.

File download (3:10 mins | 24 MB)

Elizabeth Wolff plays Rachmaninoff - 1.

Peter Carter — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:39:00 +0100

This is one of Rachmaninoff's Moments Musicaux, opus 16. It is played by Elizabeth Wolff. The recording comes from Magnatune.com.

Podhawk gives you a wide choice of Flash players for playing mp3 files, including the classic LoudBlog design (shown here), the One Pixel Out player and a range of emff players. The colours and behaviour of the One Pixel Out player are fully customisable.

Elizabeth Wolff ::
Magnatune ::

File download (8:56 mins | 8 MB)

Elizabeth Wolff plays Rachmaninoff - 2

Peter Carter — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:39:00 +0100

Elizabeth Wolff

A bit more Rachmaninoff, because I like it!

PodHawk contains an images manager which allows you to upload JPG, GIF and PNG images. You can resize and rename images if you want to, and use PodHawk to generate the HTML to place the image and a caption in your posting, as here.

File download (4:56 mins | 5 MB)

A YouTube playlist

Peter Carter — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:37:35 +0100

Here is PodHawk/JW player with a YouTube playlist.

File download (0:00 mins | 0 MB)

Remotely hosted Flash video

Peter Carter — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:37:08 +0100

The video here is a remote .flv file from the Longtail Video site.

File download (0:00 mins | 0 MB)

Bunny - streaming video

Peter Carter — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:37:00 +0100

This is PodHawk and the JW player playing a streaming video file.

File download (0:00 mins | 0 MB)