Sidepodcast

As Christine pointed out already, yesterday was a bad day in the Sidepodcast office. In part because due to what can only be described as “some confusion” from the people at YouTube, we were served with a copyright infringement notice.

That kind of thing is never going to set your day off well, especially when it turns out to be completely false. Or at least we think it has, YouTube appear to have taken a vow of silence over the whole affair.

Just an Ordinary Day

The morning started pleasantly with some non-taxing file uploads planned for the latest video of Inside Track, when just after 11am, the following email arrived:

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As you may have noticed, we released a new video last weekend, and via the comments we received a couple of requests to enable better sharing of said new content.

We’ve become pretty adept at distributing audio with F1 Minute recently, so we have a pretty good idea of how to go about it, but we’ve been neglecting Sidepodcast on that front.

If you’ve been following the comments, you’ll know that Lou suggested that F1 Rewind would make a fine Facebook application, while Shaun asked if there was a simple way of embedding the videos into his site.

We’re always keen to receive input and feedback, and it seems only fair that when people make cool suggestions we act upon them, and we’ve done just that.

We have a shiny new Sidepodcast TV Facebook application ready and waiting to be added to your profile. We threw together a version during the weekend, and polished it up today. New episodes are added the moment we release them, so you’re always up-to-date with the latest content.

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Near the end of last year we mentioned that we were busy learning the finer details about WordPress installations. We were doing this mostly so that we could build the theme Christine could only find in her head, but also because we wanted to extend the platform a bit further.

Today, we can announce the first of those extensions, the F1 Minute Player.

Sharing

You may remember a while back that we made F1 Minute available to any website wishing to use it.

Embedding “bytesize Formula 1 news”, involved copying and pasting a small block of code, which wasn’t particularly onerous, but now we’ve made it even more straightforward.

If you have WordPress installed it’s just a case of copying some files, before dragging the player into position on your page.

Plugging In

More information can be found in the the plugin directory, including detailed installation instructions, various configuration options and a couple of screenshots. There’s also further information on the F1 Minute site too.

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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!