Fellow podcasters,
I'm writing to share some news about a few of the updates I've just rolled out, but before I do, I just want to thank you for being a Fireside customer. We've been hard at work behind the scenes on a lot of new features, bugfixes, and laying the groundwork for some big features coming later this year, many of which have been inspired by your suggestions and feedback.
Fireside simply wouldn't exist without your patronage and input, and I'm thrilled every day that I get to create something that is helpful and valuable to people like you. Thank you for making this community great!
New Theme Engine
The biggest update is our new Theme Engine. Rewritten and redesigned from the ground up, we have completely replaced the previous system, creating a new engine that will allow for rapid development of new themes, offering tons of possibilities for how your site looks, feels, and operates, giving you more control over the experience.
Our initial challenge was to create a new framework that would be flexible enough to for the creation of dramatically different designs without requiring deep coding and development every time. The next challenge was to completely recreate the existing website theme from the new framework, pixel for pixel.
You can find Theme settings under the Appearance menu on the left-side menu in your Dashboard. Right now there's just the one "Classic" theme you're already familiar with, but more will be appearing very soon, so stay tuned.
Note: If you were have manually overwritten the CSS of your Fireside website (using the Header Injection feature under the Advanced section of your Dashboard), it's very likely these changes will no longer work, and you might need to refactor them. I sent an email to everyone who was affected by this change last week, so hopefully it's not a surprise to you when you see this newsletter.
Miscellaneous New Features
- I've rearranged a few items on your Podcast Dashboard to make things easier and more direct:
- The Bookmarklet now lives on the Podcast's Settings Page
- The aforementioned Appearance Section for picking Themes and Theme Options
- I've moved the Import feature to its own dedicated section
Upcoming Features
We are hard at work on a handful of new features, launching "soon" in approximately this order:
- I just signed an agreement (and wrote the code feature) for distribution to a very well known, huge, awesome music+podcast service/app that I am not yet allowed to name, but which you have heard of and likely use and have maybe even asked about publishing your podcast content into
- Quick and easy Episode renumbering
- Batch editing for episodes
- New branding
- More Themes (minimalist themes coming first)
- Improved Billing System
- Stats v2
Behind-The-Scenes Enhancements
I do lots of infrastructure work, bug fixing, and generally try to make things as awesome as possible. Most of the time I don't talk about these types of things, but I thought I'd share a list of highlights just for fun:
- Major rewrite of our RSS feed generation engine -- it is now 90% faster
- Major resource upgrade (RAM+CPU+Storage) to all of our servers
- Upgraded our CDN
- Added Google Cloud storage as an automated secondary/backup service
- Added an additional cache server to speed up page delivery and increase redundancy
- Added an additional application server for increased speed and redundancy
- Added an additional work server (these handle the background processing of your mp3 files, images, and stats) for increased speed and redundancy
- Improved the Redirects listing page
- Took the Uploads feature out of beta
- Changed the Castro URL from prefixed to free-form as their links are kind of "wonky"
- Lots of bugs fixed, too many to name (but thank you if you submitted one!)
- Many performance enhancements site-wide
There's lots more to come, so stay tuned. And again, thank you so much for being a Fireside customer and part of this amazing community.
Happy podcasting!
Dan Benjamin
Founder, Fireside.fm
