Tuesday 13 March 2012
Oh, speaking of the hard launch, as I did 2 minutes ago in that last blog post, it’s very, very soon. Basically there are just some niceties to fix to make sure the whole signup procedure is as smooth as possible and whatnot, and then I’ll start publicizing Castmate as much as I can.
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Tuesday 13 March 2012
Just want to give a quick mention to the coolest Google Chrome extension I have used, Parrotfish. If you use Chrome, and browse Twitter using the web interface, it’s amazing, it gives you clickable previews of pretty much any picture, movie, blog entry, etc., that anyone links on Twitter, not just the tiny handful that Twitter has bothered to add previews for. Quite often, people I follow link pictures from MLKSHK, or Imgur , and it’s great to see a quick preview of those without having to open a new tab/window, but what I actually find most useful about it, is being able to quickly preview blog and Tumblr entries that people post with less than descriptive titles.
Very useful extension, figured I would mention it here since it sort of ties in with Castmate (and I’ll of course try to get them to add Castmate user pages as a data source once the official hard launch hits).
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Monday 27 February 2012
I should have mentioned in my last post, Castmate does have a Twitter account (of course!), it’s @CastmateFM, so feel free to add that and whatnot. You can also email me by contacting andrew @ this domain, which is of course castmate.fm, feel free to get in touch that way too.
:: Share or discuss :: 2012-02-27 :: admin
Monday 27 February 2012
This weekend, I went to an event called Podcamp Toronto. I guess it’s an unconference, which is like a conference, but less rigid and more participant-driven.
It was okay, I didn’t find as much as I wanted at it, but I think it was worth going. I’m not going to write anything (I don’t want the presenter to google himself and find me saying this, since I’m sure he’s a nice guy), but the first session I went to was pretty bad. I knew it’d be pretty basic, but it related to podcasts and hosting, so I went, and was pretty disappointed, even for what it was.
During the question and answer period, someone mentioned something about Amazon S3 being “literally 20 times cheaper” than a popular podcast hosting solution, and I was shocked, since as far as I’ve ever seen, S3 is kind of expensive as bandwidth goes, and not a great solution for podcast hosting, unless you have a very, very low-traffic podcast. I asked the guy about his comment after the talk, and he told me how much he spent on S3, and it was pretty shocking, it wasn’t 2o times cheaper than using a podcast host, it was actually about 10 times more than a cheap podcast hosting plan. So that was weird.
That guy (who made the S3 comment) was interesting to talk to though, to hear his methods of uploading his podcast. He’s obviously fairly tech savvy, because he didn’t mind going through quite a few steps to get his episodes up, but it sounded like a schlep to me (not that I’m unbiased, running a hosting service focused on simplicity haha).
I went to a couple of talks on PR and they were okay. Both were about pitching stories to reporters, and the presenters seemed to know their stuff, but I don’t know how much I got out of it. A lot of it was general “know who you are pitching to” stuff, which is clearly a good idea, but it’s something I’ve heard a lot. I happened upon a couple of small clips online afterwards of someone from a PR agency giving another talk at this conference, and he was talking a lot about how you should befriend journalists, and really get to know them, etc. etc. This is also clearly a great idea, but it’s not exactly the most useful information for someone who isn’t a full-time PR person. It’s sort of like “oh yeah, you’re right, it WOULD be cool if I had a bunch of close personal relationships with journalists as I launch this site, great point!”. To be fair, I’m not sure what audience his talk was aimed at (although you’d sort of think PR people would already know this stuff).
Trying to remember what else I saw. Oh yeah, there was a pretty cool talk on the Facebook Open Graph, I liked that, I don’t think the presenter had enough time to really get into a lot of meat, but it was good, and it’s a subject I’m interested in. I would have loved to see a longer presentation on this.
I skipped the second day of it, because it was short, and while there was one session on mobile startups that looked interesting, it wasn’t something that was directly relevant to anything I’ll be doing in the near future, and I did have something else to do that afternoon. After I decided to skip it, I found out that they added a session on iOs interfaces, which seemed like it would be cool (I’ll be working on the Castmate mobile app soon), and after looking through that presenter’s site and Twitter a bit, it seemed like he’s a very smart guy, so I regret missing that.
Well, this was rambling, yoops!
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Monday 27 February 2012
Hello! Just thought I’d write a quick update, since I haven’t really touched this blog.
The site is still in beta. Most stuff is working fine, but I haven’t gone ahead and done any publicity or anything. There are a few other little non-Castmate projects I am in the middle of (I am busy migrating all my other sites to a new server and consolidating a bunch of stuff), so I haven’t quite been able to finish off the things I want to on Castmate. Hopefully by the end of this week, I’ll be ready to go crazy on it. It’s frustrating that I have a few cool things to add to it, but some not-super-fun things need to be polished up first.
I have some more stuff to write, but it doesn’t fit into this post really, I just wanted to provide a quick update for anyone reading this blog, as to how the site is going and when the proper launch will be.
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Friday 10 February 2012
This is the first post on the Castmate blog. Not a ton to say, the site is up, but it’s a soft launch and hasn’t been widely linked or anything yet, so this blog is brand new.
So that’s all for now, I’ll add some more soon. Sorry for the lack of blogginess at this moment!
:: Share or discuss :: 2012-02-10 :: admin