Self Hosting? Or no self hosting. | Chronicles of Everything #2
I am writing to you from my bed again. Last post I wrote about how I was sick for a bit with a cold. I was pretty much fine until Sunday last week. That is the 11th of February. Now I have got the maracas in my lungs, coughing up slime and just freezing in general. No idea if this is covid or not and it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I don’t know why I am sick again, maybe I am just weak. Or maybe this is what you get for working with a corona treatment device at work. (/j it’s a real thing but unrelated to covid). Who the fuck gets sick just from being at home?
This entry is pretty technical about podcasting, so don’t bother reading if you don’t care about that. I will not be talking about the breakdown of my startOS machine yet, because I have not yet investigated.
Self hosting
seems great until you run into issues. For my radio show podcast The Fairly Fun Show, I decided to self host it when i first set that feed up. Which at the time seemed like almost the only way to actually even have a feed with features like time splits. So I set up a feed using Sovereign Feeds and created chapters and time splits with the split kit. Hosted on a Digital Ocean storage space. At the time that seemed great, a pretty cheap way to get a little experiment started. I liked the fact that I could directly work with the file structure for example. I don’t think that has a real impact but that seems cool.
Problems then arise from the fact that both of those tools are run by one guy. Which is not a bad thing, but you don’t get a lot of varied testing. So it would often have weird bugs of not saving correctly, displaying things wrongly and weird in the UI, while the feed itself is OK. The UI overall kind of has the theme of “Shit someone just made up quickly”. Which I don’t mean in a mean way, but in a charming and loving kind of way. You get it if you see it. Thankfully though Steven did pretty much always read my dumbass mistakes and complaints, and point me in the correct direction, or change something on the site. It is very cool these 2 sites exist and function at all. For all the people who are happy with living on the edge of a hot knife.
In addition to this, Cameron with IPFS Podcasting has built a seemingly robust network for delivering audio files to people. Saving you bandwidth costs if you self host. I do run nodes and i will continue to run them. It is a really cool project.
The big problem arises from the fact that you can not easily move away from a feed hosted in a storage bucket, to something else. Normally your old hosting provider would set up a web server redirect. So when an app tries to access to feed, it gets pointed to the new one. That can’t really be done when you just used the direct link of a storage bucket. Which leads to you needing to message the Podcast Index to manually swap out your feed link. Instead of relying on your old hosting company, now you are relying on the Index to change it. So I guess, proceed with caution. Things can seemingly go wrong more easily with a self hosted feed.
It supports all of the podcasting 2.0 features that matter to me. Not every single tag that exists, but the good ones. In my opinion. The UI for that service seems really nice and easily understood. Finally a Podcasting 2.0 thing that doesn’t just immediately look horrible and technical. The pricing model also seems alright, you essentially pay for each episode you upload. While you can create as many feeds as you want, in one account.
The most important thing to me is the way you add in time splits for songs for example. On the Split Kit and Podhome you have to search via the Album name. Which I think just is a horrible way of searching for songs. I know the song title, I often also know the artist, but never the album. RSS Blue does allow you to search for the song title, and it has fuzzy search too. So even if you misspell it, RSS Blue probably finds it anyways.
Because I saw this fuzzy search for the titles, I asked if they could add parsing of cue files, to automatically create time splits with the songs already matched up. Because that is the other file Mixxx spits out after I am done recording a Fairly Fun Show episode. A audio file, and a cue with which song was played when. Of course you still need to manually check each split, but that could be a game changer. Apparently this can be added rather quickly, so we will see what happens. Overall, RSS Blue I definitely recommend. Especially if just starting out.
Now for Podhome. Podhome does all the same things plus more 2.0 tags are usable in it, except it doesn’t have as nice of an interface and it doesnt support search via the title. Same as with RSS Blue, when Barry is there he is gonna do his best to help you out. And I have already caused an actual change in Podhome. Podhome transcodes all your audio to specific standards, which before only differed for Podcast and Music feeds. Podcast using settings suitable for speech, but pretty crap sounding for music. Now that I have a Podcast, which plays music, I wanted the better quality. So Barry added a new feed type into the Podhome settings, giving you a Podcast feed with the high quality. That already would have been immensly cool in my mind, but then Barry also reimported all of the episodes to have them transcode in the high quality. I would have been fine with doing that myself. But this was awesome. Barry also noticed some issues and he handled the already mentioned changing of the URL on the Index as well.
The main reason why I am interested in Podhome is the AI features it has. It can create a transcript for you, your show notes, chapters and even clips. I did use those once, but the show notes just ended up pretty crap. Which is not surprising. The show notes probably had more words than I even said on the radio show. Because it is a radio show. The clips feature also seems lost with this format. But I am excited for using these when my other show is going to make a comeback soon. Yea, Uploaded is coming back. I miss shitting on tech news.
The UI on Podhome at times seems a bit weird. Like when adding time splits. It shows you the time splits but only kind of half of the information, Which did confuse me for a bit. Turns out, you have to press the radio buttons to expand each listing. Which I don’t think is what radio buttons are for. If it was something like an arrow I would be fine with it. Also just in general some things pop up in weird places. Like the option to delete an episode is visible in every menu. I don’t see why I need a delete button under where you put your chapters, or add who was on the show. But all of these are just little quirks that you can deal with once you see it.
You can actually use the code gopodcasting to get couple of months of Podhome free. Although the pricing with Podhome is also good. 15,99 for everything unlimited. It seems like if you do a little podcast every once in a while for fun, RSS Blue could be the better choice. With the simpler UI and it could be cheaper. While Podhome seems more suited for people who already know a little more and want to create many episodes, with the assistance of the magical computer brain technology. With the 3 months for free, just go grab Podhome and see. But, both are great choices.
GO PODCASTING!!!
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GO PODCASTING!!! 〰️
I did not get any form of payment for writing this, except for the 7 days trial of RSS Blue potentially could be seen as that. But I would be surprised if Dovydas didn’t hand that to you as well, if you ask nicely.