PodPress has Vanished!

WordPress is the platform of choice for most podcasters running their own sites. One of the reasons for this is that it offers the most support and available plugins make it a powerful solution. In my opinion the most essential plugin for the podcaster is PodPress. However it appears that PodPress has vanished and is now a parked page at GoDaddy.

I just could not believe that such a successful plugin could be abandoned so I did some digging and it appears that the developer Dan Kuykendall went to Disneyland 18 days ago and forgot something rather important. It would appear that on the 26th of April their domain name expired. Do’h…

That is the conclusion that I have come to, anyone else know any different?

If however, the developer has jumped ship and abandoned development then I will be very surprised. If for nothing else than the fact that no one else has taken over the project.

One good thing until everything is sorted out is that it appears the download links are still operational from the WordPress extend site.

I certainly hope that PodPress is here to stay, I know I value the project as one of the best podcasting tools out there. Seriously though, GoDaddy start sending out emails at least 6 months before your domains expire, just don’t ignore them. Or change your renewal details to automatic renewal. But then it seems that it doesn’t matter how many reminders some people get.

Thanks Dan for your hard work and I trust that you have just forgotten to renew your domain.

UPDATE: I am not sure what the go is, but during the course of writing this post MightySeek is back up and “un-parked”. I also noticed that the whois has changed and the domain that expired in 2008 is now 2009. So perhaps suspicions were in fact true and we had a domain glitch eh? Yey, is all I can say.

Ever Been Stumped By a Root Zone?

I never knew this existed. You are aware that in a top level domain (TLD) address there is a zone suffix or country code. I guess you would call it that but I am not a domain guru by any stretch. For example here in Australia it is the .au that denotes this country. Some of these suffixes have me stumped at the best of times.

But thanks to the The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) a service associated with The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers there is a list called the Root Zone Whois Index. So next time you are not sure where a domain is based then take a look and check.

You can click any of these codes and get the Whois information and where to apply for registration. Using other country codes has been popular in the Web 2.0 era for those creative site names like del.icio.us who’s url is http://del.icio.us (United States). So even though a website may have a weird country domain name it may well be based in a totally different place, so don’t make too many assumptions from it.

But the site will forever fix your need to know where. For the uber Geeks out there sorry if I messed anything up. But as I said I ain’t no guru. Feel free to correct me in the comments.

http://roostersrail.com Yep I Own It!

I bit the bullet today and purchased http://roostersrail.com! I knew that it has been available for some time but up until now I have not bothered to purchase it. But now I have become sufficiently attached to it I decided that I didn't want anyone else to have it.

So I now own another domain and I'd like to think that I will hang onto this one. I guess that it makes the Rail seem more like mine. In addition to that if ever I move the blog I don't have to get everyone to change their bookmarks, I just redirect the forwarding from my domain administration. This is a very convenient feature of having your own domain for your blog or website.
So update those bookmarks! Why not head on over to the good guys at Go Daddy and get a domain of your own, it is cheap too!

Updated the Webpage

Nothing major today, I have made a few changes to the Global Geek Podcast Homepage.

Because the web-page for the Global Geek Podcast was such hard work I have avoided changing anything for fear it would all be ruined. But I can say that now it is all set and basically the way it will be for a while, editing it in a minor way was easy. I just cut and paste the HTML our and into Nvu which is an open source WYSIWYG editor for web pages. It is excellent because as you would know from the podcast Sebastian and I do not try to pass ourselves off as HTML guru’s at all. Quite the opposite; we suck! Nvu is highly recommended by myself, especially if you don’t want to spend any money – it works!

As you might know from Sebastian’s blog, he purchased a domain name: sebrt.com for his blog page, which he has “masked” with that domain. So I thought it only fair that the link to his blog be that, so that done he should now be happy.

The other change is that you will notice that there is a link to The Knightsite. There is a bit of a story behind this one. Another great story of networking, Skype and the community of podcasters, bloggers. Turns out that this Belgian dude called Joe (a.k.a Knightwise) was cruising around the Skype “search for contacts” option in Skype. I don’t know what for but eh, he was there. He happened across Sebastian’s Skype id which detailed his podcasting involvement. So Joe called him up, as it happens Sebastian and I were talking at the time and we invited the Knight into the conversation and we all hit it off. Joe is a top bloke and he has a podcast called the Knightcast. It is a great quality podcast; hell he uses VBR encoding at high bit rates – bandwidth must be cheap in Belgum! Plus I think his accent is cool.

So Knightwise should have a place on our Podcast Homepage. We often talk now and encourage each other with our projects and we are planning some joint ones coming up so that will be fun. It is true that the internet does not know borders or nationality. I am stoked that I have yet another person added to my own community that is mutually moving towards bettering our “space”. There is no way in the world that my own universe would have opened up as much as it has without this wonderful medium called the internet, which is starting to reflect real world interactions and ways of meeting new friends. And that is just plain cool.

By the way please have a listen to the Knightcast, great quality and very impressive editing, he deserves a bigger audience and he is a top bloke.

So that’s about it for the web-page update, but as usual I can talk about anything for too long!

RSS Busted!

Bit of an update on the Podcast.

Well I got some great news last night, the domain resolved for the Global Geek Podcast! Woot. So now everybody this is important: the URL for the podcast is now:

http://www.globalgeekpodcast.com

So please update that.

On a slightly different note, like anything I seem to do there was no silver lining to this story. Rather there was a grimy smudged edge. It would appear that the RSS feed for the podcast and the blog page is BUSTED! Yup you got it the feed is broke. By that I mean that it will not work. The reason being that the feed will not validate. So when you sophisticated people that use Firefox go there you will not see an RSS feed detect in the address bar! Damn it. Looking at the report on the feed it looks like all that is missing from it is a < symbol at a critical point, but hey I don’t know RSS code so what do I know. That’s what I an paying Libsyn for!

Yes I am bummed about it, a fairly crucial piece to podcasting and subscription is that the feed works! But I have emailed Libsyn with the problem and I will let you know when it is all up and running.

Looking at it I do not think it has anything to do with the domain name resolving because I tested the previous RSS feed; before the change and I got the same error. So anyone wanting to get a domain name – fear not!

I would also like to thank those that are commenting on the blog and dropping me a line. I can not tell you what a motivation it is to keep it up and I’m feeling pretty good about it all. Thanks. By the way don’t forget that if you don’t feel like typing you can always just leave me an audio comment with odeo, just click the link on the side bar to the right.

One last thing – still looking for an artist to give us a logo; preferably a cool one (logo that is the artist can be a complete dag… like me!).