We've been heads-down on infrastructure this past month — completing a handful of internal upgrades, improving how podcast feeds are generated and secured, and finishing the foundation under the new Studio UI.
Sponsor Management
Sponsor pages now give you a much clearer picture at a glance. Header pills show how many sponsor messages are published, scheduled, draft, and unlisted — separated by subtle dividers. Each sponsor surfaces its next upcoming episode so you know when their next message lands without clicking through.
Sponsor Message Image Warnings
If you paste an <img> tag into a sponsor message, we'll warn you that podcast apps strip those images so you know your audience won't see them. Sponsor logos hosted on Fireside still render in the places where images are allowed.
Smarter Metrics Y-Axis
Metrics chart axes now abbreviate large numbers — 12,500 reads as "12.5K", a million as "1M" — so the labels stay readable as your downloads grow.
Small Refinements
- All of your podcast URL settings now live on a single Domain Settings page instead of being split across more than one location.
- The podcast import page got a copy and layout pass — tighter wording, and the non-destructive reassurance moved into the action bar where it's actually visible during the import flow.
<h1>headings now render correctly in custom page bodies.- YouTube Podcasts replaces Google Play / Google Podcasts in your distribution settings, since Google retired their podcast platform.
Under the Hood
While the surface-level improvements tend to stand out more, they're only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We've been hard at work on plenty of other improvements that aren't quite as visible.
- Faster, more reliable podcast feeds. RSS feed generation got a substantial rewrite — one consolidated pass instead of several, with a hard performance budget that we test against on every change so the gains don't slip back.
- Tightened security around customer-published HTML. We upgraded the HTML parser that protects your podcast pages and feeds from malicious markup, and closed several edge cases where unusual formatting could slip past it.
- The new UI is enabled for everyone. We're still cleaning up the legacy interface elements, but we're one step closer to being able to iterate on some great new functionality in the near future.
Fixes
A handful of fixes are also worth flagging:
- RSS feeds with trailer episodes now sort strictly by publish date.
- Bulk episode editing again persists all of the updated values correctly when submitted together.
- Some new edge cases for failed MP3 uploads now surface a clear error message instead of failing silently.
