Hello fellow podcasters!
I have some fun updates to share with you today, so let's get started.
Fireside Player v2
After lots of hard work, development, and testing, I'm thrilled to announce the release of our new podcast player!
This new player represents a lot of time spent researching how our users and their listeners want to experience playing an episode on a website. It offers all the features you'd hope for, including volume and speed controls, the ability to skip ahead or back, the episode's artwork and title, links back to your podcast's website, a waveform, download and share links for your podcast that integrate with the player -- all in a clean, concise package that's been optimized for both desktop and mobile devices. And the player is smart: it will automatically switch from dark to light themes based on your website's default theme, creating a perfectly integrated experience for your visitors.
Embedding the player is as easy as ever. Just grab the link from the "Share" tab in an episode's dashboard page, or from the "Share" link on any episode's public page. If you're comfortable editing the provided link, you can easily customize the player as well, by setting the player's width, or changing the theme from "dark" to "light". Note that any width less than 740 pixels will switch the player into "mobile mode", which has a slightly different appearance.
And don't worry about your previous player embeds! They will continue to work just fine without any action on your part. We wouldn't want to break anyone's webpage layouts by dropping in a larger, more robust player. You're in control of if and when you switch the older embeds to the new player.
Twitter Player
In addition to developing a new player, we're putting the finishing touches on a full-featured Twitter player. It's almost ready, so stay tuned!
Stats Update
We're continuing to roll out regular improvements to our stats algorithm, with input from other hosting company founders and developers, the Open Podcast Analytics Working Group, and our friends at Chartable. I'll be talking more about this as we get closer to our algorithm's "final form", which will ensure parity with other systems' stats and likely IAB compliance as well.
Fireside Community Website
We've recently added a new Community website for feature requests, discussions, and other non-support related feedback to replace the "Issues" page at Github. The new system allows for better and easier communication, and I encourage all of you to give it a try -- we'd love to hear from you, and it's a great place to share your thoughts. You can access the site here.
To kick things off, I've started a handful of new topics. Keep reading to learn about them.
Network Support
Fireside's Network support module is almost done (and we'll be moving 5by5.tv to Fireside once it's complete)! I've started a new topic in the Community section where you can get updates, ask questions, and make feature suggestions. Please visit the Networks topic in our Community forum to see where things are and how you can help beta test the new features.
Listener Support
About a year ago, we quietly developed a complete, integrated membership and donation system within Fireside. It allowed any podcaster to receive donations from listeners, and control what content they were able to access based on there donation amount. You could create content only supporters would receive, published to personalized, private RSS feeds just for each supporter. You could have content drop early into those feeds, just for paying supporters. And much more.
But I never released it.
Why not?
You'll find the answer as well as an opportunity to be involved in the beta and integration with Patreon and other systems here.
Dynamic Ad Insertion
Do you monetize your podcast with ads? would you like to be involved in the beta for dynamic ad insertion? Should we do this? Tell me! Go here.
Pro Plan
I'm still deep in code-land building a handful of new features, many of which will be part of the Pro Plan (pricing TBD), and I'd love your feedback and suggestions. Let's talk about it here.
Fireside Chat
We're going to be doing a probably-weekly live Fireside Chat (I'm a dad, so dad jokes are allowed) where we'll be streaming live and talking about Fireside, answering your questions about the platform, podcasting technique, and podcasting in general. It should be a fun way for all of us to connect to talk and meet eachother, and hopefully a great way for us to work together on making Fireside the best it can be.
I'll announce the streaming info in the newsletter and in your dashboard news section very soon. Please join us!
That's it for this update. Thank you very much for being a Fireside customer, and for helping build this amazing community of podcasters!
