Podcasting woes shall turn to gold

It's not been an easy month or so for the operations of the Charlottesville Podcasting Network. But, there's been a lot of great news, as new volunteers come into the fold.

For starters, there have been two big failures in the last month, and I've just discovered I might be in the midst of a third. On Christmas Eve, my database suddenly corrupted for no apparent reason and I couldn't post anything new. I was able to restore a back-up without losing too much data, but it took three days. Last week, my hosting provider switched my account to a new server, and forgot to connect the dots completely. I fixed that one somehow, and ended up upgrading to all new plug-ins.

Somehow, though, that disconnected the actual podcasting component of the site. For whatever reason, I can't get the audio files to get into the enclosure. This means that I'm getting no downloads at all. But, I am searching for ways to solve the problem.

And, in the process of solving this problem (which I'm sure I'll do) I know the site will be better than ever. There will be more content. Last week at Court Square Tavern I had ten people attend a very informal training session. I think it worked out fairly well, and I'll be doing a lot more of these in the near future.

For now, though, the trouble is what to do about the lack of podcasts through the Charlottesville Podcasting Network feed. In the meantime, I can point you all in the direction of the pages for the other podcasts that are CPN affiliates. Keep in mind, these are the feeds. The skin for these feeds, meaning the actual websites, are still being experimented with, so subscribe to the feeds if you'd like to keep up with the podcasts, which are still being posted.

Virginia Podcasting Network: Mostly podcasts about Virginia politics
WINA's "Charlottesville--Right Now!" with Coy Barefoot
WNRN's Sunday Morning Wake Up Call:

I'm almost certain that the vast majority of the CPN audience gets the content through an RSS feed, or through the e-mail subscription. Especially since the redesign, which I think has had the effect of killing off most web traffic. It is hard to tell at a glance what the new content is. We are working to make it better, but again, there's still a big pretty audience for the feed.

I think by the time I finished this e-mail, I got it almost working again. If so, I'll post the feed later. I think I am going to try to post more news about the site here. There's really nowhere on the CPN site itself for me to comment.