PodHawk

…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 webpage 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 the latest version of PodHawk here.

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

Sourceforge have announced that they will soon stop supporting the applications which run the PodHawk Forum and the PodHawk Wiki.

I have moved the PodHawk Forum to the PodHawk website. You can find it here. Users will probably find that their previous passwords do not work, and that they need to get a new password by clicking the “Forgot your password?” link. Please let me know if you have problems with the new Forum.

I will also move the Wiki to the PodHawk website, but I will host it on PodHawk software instead of MediaWiki. I will also take the opportunity to rewrite and re-organise it and generally make it more useful. You will be able to use the comments section below each Documentation post to add your own contributions to the PodHawk knowledge base. For the moment, the old Wiki remains active, but you can see progress on the new Documentation on http://www.podhawk.com/index.php?cat=docs.

The ‘backend’ or administration pages of your PodHawk site are at http://YOUR_SITE_URL/podhawk. You need your login name and password to log in. There is a “remember me” option which will set a cookie on your computer. When you first log in, PodHawk will take you to “Recording page 1” where you can upload a podcast file, or link to a file elsewhere on the web. On subsequent visits. PodHawk will take you to the “List of Postings” page.

The menu on the left-hand side of each backend page contains links to all the other backend pages, plus a few more useful links. If you are an “admin” user with full privileges, you can access all the backend pages. If you are not an admin user, you can access only some of them.

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You need :

• access to a server. If you want other people to be able to download your podcasts, you need a public web address (eg http://www.mypodcasts.com). If you simply want to play around with PodHawk, you can install a copy on your own desktop/laptop computer.

• a web server programme. The machine on which you install PodHawk needs to have a web server programme such as Apache. PodHawk runs well on Apache. Some quick tests suggest that it will also run satisfactorily on Microsoft IIS.

• PHP. The machine also needs the PHP programming language. PodHawk runs on PHP5. It will not run on PHP4.

• a database. Podhawk can use MySQL, Postgres8 or SQLite. If you are using MySQL or Postgres, you should set up the database before you start, and make a note of the database name, and your username and password. You don’t need to set up a SQLite database in advance – the PodHawk installation programme will do it for you.

• an FTP programme. You need this to upload files to your server. There is lots of choice – just google “FTP”. Some of the best are free eg Filezilla, and the FireFTP extension for the Firefox web browser.

Now see:

Running the installation programme.

Changing permissions

This page shows some of the capabilities of PodHawk to play a variety of video and audio file types. Video files are handled by the JW Player; MP3 audio files are handled either by the JW player or by a choice of Flash-based players.

PodHawk can count how many times your audio/video files have been played or downloaded and can display the number of downloads on the webpage.