Sidepodcast

We talked briefly on last weeks show about some minor issues we’ve had recently in regards to our bandwidth costs. If you managed to get to the end of that episode we mentioned a spike in traffic led our hosting company, Media Temple, to warn us we could be looking at a bill for $350+ at the end of the month, and then the traffic spiked yet further.

The Price of Fish

As you can imagine, there’s no way we could afford those kind of costs once, let alone on an ongoing basis. The hosting company includes in their grid-service, one terabyte of bandwidth per month and until now that’s suited us just fine. Anything over that though gets billed at more than two dollars per gigabyte and in July we shifted almost double our allocation.

Media Temple do a sterling job of providing us with solid web hosting, the kind that lets us handle 1,600 comments per thread without blinking, but they never claimed to offer infinite bandwidth.

We’ve obviously been testing out a bunch of alternate solutions and amongst them is Amazon S3, which in truth has been a little unreliable of late, but does offer unlimited bandwidth (although it is expensive). More importantly though, S3 acts as a tracker for torrent files as well as a permanent seeder and this is where things get interesting.

Continue reading…

So the first attempt at commenting / chatting went pretty well, smashing all previous discussion records in the process.

We’re opening up a new thread for the second session, partly to give the server a break and partly because it seems like a sensible approach. After a very brief investigation, there appears to be a whole bunch of improvements we can make to ensure live commenting is faster and smoother in the future, but for now we’ll go with what we have.

Live timing is running and the cars are on the track. As ever this is all about the opinion, so we’ll throw our observations into the ring as we go.

Yell if you’re still awake!

• Length: 04:23 
• Size: 48.9 MB 
• File: video23.m4v 
• Transcript: video23.pdf 
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It’s a new year, so a good time to pilot our latest video idea. It’s a concept for a show that we’ve been kicking around for a while now, and finally decided the time was right to pull it all together. A weird decision, given it’s all about Formula 1 news and there’s very little around at the moment.

Anyway, as a pilot, the emphasis is on you guys to let us know what you think, and whether it’s worth the bandwidth it consumes. Also as a pilot, it is obviously new and may face tweaks at any moment - like the fact that I called it a weekly show, which may have been a little bit hasty.

Either way, the important thing for now is to watch, soak up the F1 vibe and share your opinion.

As Formula 1 heads into it’s ‘winter break’ and the daily influx of gossip and rumour fades to a quiet whisper, we figured it would an ideal time to launch a news site!

They don’t pay us the big bucks for nothing, let me tell ya.

Actually, it’s not really a news site per se, we’re just giving F1 Minute a home of it’s own. The recent addition to our podcasting stable, has grown so rapidly and consistently that it’s ready to leave the tender bosom of Sidepodcast, and venture out into the big, bad world on it’s own.

You can view the new site at: http://www.f1minute.com/. It’s still a little wet behind the ears, but basically fit for purpose. Feel free to have a poke around and let us know what you think.

So What’s New?

From a listerner’s perspective, nothing changes. The feed is still in the same place as it always was, so if you’ve subscribed to the podcast, you’ll not miss a moment’s news. iTunes and various other podcast directories are already pointing to the new location and we’ve moved all posts and comments across to the new domain.

Additionally Christine has created a Twitter thingy, to keep you bang up-to-date with the latest in news and gossip. Just in case the idea of ‘F1 news every single weekday’, is simply not enough information for you.

So Why Change?

We’ve created a new home for F1 minute, because it was getting a little bit swamped by all the action on this site. Many search engines struggled to pick up the latest posts and because it didn’t get a look-in on the homepage, not everybody spotted it.

Additionally we’ve picked a pretty solid hosting company (that I believe is the same as Ollie’s), which should give us an extra layer of stability after some of the hosting problems we’ve had here. Ideally we’d like to move to Amazon’s EC2 cloud, but the technology is too immature to make the jump right now. Media Temple offer a good compromise, which is less flexible, but not so cutting-edge.

What About Embedded Content?

If you’ve jumped on board and added the embeddable F1 Minute player to your site / blog / forum, we’ve not forgotten you. The good news is you don’t have to change a single line of code. You’ve probably noticed that today’s episode is still happily running on your site and it will continue to do so.

However, if you’ve got five minutes to spare, we do recommend that you take a look at the new sharing page. The code listed there has been tweaked in order to point to the new domain. Upgrading code on your site will enable you to benefit from the increased reliability that the new host’s offer us, and we’ll also be adding new players and customised embed options to that page soon.

Just to re-iterate, you don’t have to change anything, we know you’re busy people and we don’t like to impose.

In Conclusion

So, there you have it. New domain, new host, better stability and a web site dedicated solely to the vocals of Ms. Blachford.

Oh, I almost forgot. The new site is entirely at the disposal of the gravelly-voiced damsel, there’ll not be an anti-McLaren post in sight (although I might stop by with some inflammatory comments). If you thought she had a lot on her plate before, you’ve not seen nothing yet!

Please stop by and say “howdy”, leave a comment or peruse at your leisure. As always, thoughts, ideas and criticism are readily welcomed.

Go there NOW!

This weekend we’re launching something a bit different. If you have a website, if you have a blog, if you have any kind of online presence at all, you might be interested to see what we’re up to.

Back in October we launched F1 Minute, a 60 second audio podcast covering the days Formula 1 headlines, released Monday through Friday. For a brand new podcast, it’s gone rather splendidly, partly thanks to being featured on both US and UK iTunes homepages. Today we’re taking it to the next level and opening up F1 Minute to any website that would like to feature it.

If you’d like to have regularly updated F1 content on your site and are interested in the details please, check out the page Free F1 News For Your Site, which has everything you need to get started.

Shaun and F1 Wolf have already jumped on board and if you’re after some free content for your site then it might be worth 10 mins of your time. Leave us a comment if you’re using F1 Minute or if there’s anything else we could enhance or improve.

Update: F1 Minute has now moved to it’s own domain. You can still get free news for your site by popping over there and following the instructions.

‘Tis the season for new podcast clients, it would seem. Earlier this week the Participatory Culture Foundation released version 1.0 of their free open-source desktop video application, more commonly referred to as Miro.

Miro has been designed with the primary goal of letting users control how they watch Internet television. Unsurprisingly this means the primary focus is video, although it will happily play audio should you want it to.

Unlike the Zune Marketplace we looked at yesterday, Miro isn’t a replacement for iTunes. For one thing, it doesn’t sync to any of your portable devices. What it is designed to do however, is offer the best all-in-one solution for watching Internet TV.

Alongside the facility to manage your video podcast subscriptions, is the ability to search multiple sources of online content (including the likes of YouTube, Dailymotion and many others). This means, not only can you find all of this years Sidepodcast TV shows easily, but you’ll also be able to keep up with the latest episodes from the likes of Honda Racing TV.

We’ve been using this application throughout its gestation period (which feels like forever). It used to be slow and clunky, but the 1.0 release has brought with it speed and stability. It looks clean and runs on almost any platform you can think of.

Internet video is big news these days, especially in the world of Formula 1. If you’re looking for a way to manage it all, you could do a lot worse than checking out Miro.