PodHawk Podcasting to the world!

I have released PodHawk 1.71 today. You can download a copy from Sourceforge.

The main new features are:

• a new Facebook plugin. This is needed because Facebook have made large changes to their API. Many of the features of the old PodHawk Facebook feature have ceased working or will shortly do so. Details here. If you use the old Facebook feature, you should switch to the new plugin, and change the settings for your Facebook application, as soon as possible.
• a new URL rewriting plugin, which will automatically rewrite the URLs of your site pages so that they are more “human readable”, and will adjust the links on your web pages to match.
• a revised Ping plugin. I have removed pinging services which no longer accept automated pings, and included a facility for adding your new post to your Delicious bookmarks.
• an autosave feature on recording page 2. This saves the posting text and title every 30 seconds, so that you never risk losing your work when your session expires. You can switch the feature on and off from the settings page.
• also on recording page 2, there is a new box in which you can enter a short summary of your posting. This is used eg in the “description” metatag in the head section of your web page and in your Delicious bookmarks.
• improved interfacing with the Disqus commenting system.
• a facility for putting QR barcodes beneath your posts. Users with Smart phones can download your podcast simply by scanning the bar code with their phone. Details here.
• a Flash file uploader on the images page, so that you can upload multiple images at the same time.
• PodHawk now downloads certain Javascript files (jquery, swfobject) from Google instead of from your site. This should improve speed and reliability.
• an improved menu system in the admin pages.

Because it was urgent to make the new Facebook plugin available, I have not had time to rewrite the interface between PodHawk and the JW player. PodHawk appears to handle the latest JW player (version 5.4) fine, but does not yet exploit its ability to use html5 tags on devices like iPhones which cannot use Flash. I will do this for the next release.