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 1.52 here.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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!

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