Dogear Nation » Podcast

I’ve just refreshed the theme of the blog for the first time in ~2 years. We’d been using the lovely i3theme for a long time, but as the show evolves and brings in new listeners (and as I’ve been curating and progressively improving / upgrading the site) it was time for an update.

The Publicizer theme we’re now using describes itself as having more of a “Web 2.0 look-and-feel” and I definitely like the rounded corners. I’ve made a few small changes to it to make the switch less jarring – I changed the header fonts from Times / serif to Trebuchet / sans-serif, and tweaked the spacing a bit. The essentials are all still here – we’re blue-and-white, we’re all logo’ed up, and the feeds and links are all still right there in the sidebar. The nice prominent search box, clean look and larger text should make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

The look is less Mac-ish, too, and although we talk Apple a lot, the show is definitely not supposed to be all about Macs or iPhones – we love our Windows, Linux, BeOS and DOS-using listeners, too A small annoyance is that you have to click through to an individual post to leave a comment, but I may change that.

All of that is just my opinion, of course, and I am but a humble web monkey. What do you think? As usual, we’re keen to hear your views – leave us a comment, or tweet us

Update: added social network links at the top right, and threaded comments!

Here at Dogear Nation headquarters we are big fans of the TWiT podcast network. On episode 82 of net@night last week, Amber MacArthur was talking about the Facebook Connect plugin for WordPress, so we thought we’d take a look.

The plugin is a great idea. It lets you use your Facebook profile information as an account on a WordPress site. We just added Facebook Connect here on the Dogear Nation blog, and you’ll see a “Facebook Community” panel in the right-hand sidebar. You can authorise with our Facebook application, and then when you comment on the blog it will use your Facebook profile information. Your comment can optionally also be posted to your Facebook wall / news feed – see the check box just underneath the comment field.

Here’s an example of what it might look like in your Facebook feed.

If you want to add the plugin to your own site, it is worth watching the installation and configuration video as there are one or two steps that you may not be familiar with if you are not a Facebook application developer.

Of course, if you’re not a Facebook user or you want to use your Google Profile to join our Dogear Nation community, we have Google Connect integrated too – it’s right there in the sidebar.

If you’re a Facebook user, you might also want to check out our fan page where we post weekly show updates, photos, and other extras.

We’ve just been doing a little housekeeping around here and this week switched around our hosting setup. For the technically-minded readers, we are now running on WordPress 2.7 and the Blubrry Powerpress podcasting plugin. In practical terms, the site itself should look the same, although I jiggled the sidebar a little.

I’ve tested things myself and it all looks OK on a range of platforms and browsers, and I think the podcast feed should still work… although in my case I had to hit “Update podcast” in iTunes to get episodes to download correctly. If you have an issue, and that workaround doesn’t help, then try resubscribing… we’re really sorry about that.

If our listeners could help by reporting any issues by email, commenting on this post, or @replying us on Twitter, that would be great.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Since I’ve been playing around with the blog for the Michaels, and knowing that the three of us are all iPhone users and that several listeners (and, I’ve noticed, an increasing number of folks around IBM Hursley) have iPhones, I thought I’d make a couple of tweaks.

The first is the webclip icon I showed off in the previous post. That means you’ll get a nice Dogear Nation logo on your Home screen if you choose to add a link to the site.

Secondly, the entire site is now optimised for viewing using Mobile Safari.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that I discovered quite a cool feature. Although the Flash-based embedded player in the posts will not work, you should see a little MP3 icon underneath it. If you click on that icon and you’re on the iPhone… you’ll be able to play the episode in Quicktime.

So now, if you don’t subscribe, or maybe you’re not near your iTunes computer and you want to check out the latest episode – you can do it!

Update: I’ve now switched off the visibility of the Flash-based player by default, as it breaks the width of the page on the iPhone (and it is actually controlled by a setting related to video podcasts, “Disable Video Preview”, in podPress). If you visit the page in a normal browser you can click “Play Now” or “Play in Popup” to get the show to play, or you can of course download the MP3.

I just spent a bit of time updating the site to run on the latest-and-greatest version of WordPress.

We use the podPress plugin, which is not currently fully compatible with WordPress 2.6.x – I’ve applied a workaround.

I’ve tested the site in Safari and Firefox 3 on Mac, and with Firefox 3, Opera (thanks James!), Internet Explorer 7 and Chrome on Windows. Let me know if you spot any breakage.

Also, if you have any feature requests or additional stuff you’d like to see on the site, please let us know by commenting on this post

Thanks for your support!

Oh, and spot the bonus feature…