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

  ShareThis  

Share this posting on Facebook

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. Or you can write your own.
• 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

I have removed the old CGI upload feature. You can upload files with the Flash uploader, the built-in FTP client (ZUpload) or with your own FTP programme eg Filezilla.

  ShareThis  

Share this posting on Facebook

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.

  ShareThis  

Share this posting on Facebook

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!

  ShareThis  

Share this posting on Facebook

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.

  ShareThis  

Share this posting on Facebook