The Slakinski Log

I’m releasing the iPodderX Python codebase As-Is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

This is the codebase that was to go into Transistr, it has never seen the light of day before now and has not seen much testing.  I have made changes to the stock Bittorrent codebase and Feedparser, so you might want to look those over before updating them to newer versions.

I’m releasing this with zero support. If you’d like to use this code in a commercial application in part or in full please contact me at ray dot slakinski at gmail dot com

Update: I chose a CC license for the iPX Python code instead of a standard GPL, LGPL, MIT, Python or even a BSD license because right now I just want the code to be out there as a reference. If you want to use the code in a project feel free to email me and I’m sure we can work something out. As the license states, you can read and distribute the code free of charge, but I still maintain ownership of the code so please do not use it in full or in part without my written permission. Thanks

Update 2: Feel free to use the code locally and change it if you want to get it to work for you, I didn’t mean to say in my first update that you couldn’t at all play with it or upgrade your existing copy of iPodderX engine.

Before we start, lets first start with a picture:

This shows sales over a 4 year period. The 3rd blip right at the end was iPodderX going away and was suppose to turn into Transistr.

When iTunes 4.9 was announced, August and I were right there for the announcement. Later we went on TWiT to talk about it, we did our best to stay positive, hiding our fear in talk about fish cheeks

We already moved iPodderX from Podcatching client to into a standard RSS reader for feed reading and podcasting. But when we decided that, we put ourselves right into the mix with NetNewsWire and NewsFire which where very popular applications that did podcasting and RSS reading very well as well. It was easy for those applications to add good enough Podcasting support. From what I know, no one ended up using iPodderX to read news feeds.

As sales were dropping like a rock, day jobs were becoming demanding, and stress on august and I’s friendship also became very strained. We decided to stop working on it and move on to other things for a bit. August has been doing great work with his FoggyNoggin software creating very useful mac utilities, and I moved over to the web,  now working full time with Mahalo.com!

I’d like to also note now the RSS application space on the desktop has changed drastically. NewsFire and NetNewsWire are now free, RSS is now in the browser (the browser itself and web apps like google reader and bloglines) and all handle RSS enclosures (what makes podcasting possible)

One last thing to leave on, iPodder (not releated to iPodderX) who is now known as Juice hasn’t been updated in eons and no other development has been made with any of the other podcatchers. We were not the only casuality.

If you have questions feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to answer them.

 Check out what August has to say regarding all of this.

Update: Talked with Andrew Grumet who now works for PodShow and this downloads chart looks very similar to ours.

I was working on an RSS feed generator for something at Mahalo and whenever I do such things I go through the RSS 2.0 Spec again to see what elements I should add to make the feed as useful as can be for 3rd party developers. I noticed a little used item called which is to link to where people can post comments to the item. Sounds simple, but no RSS reader that I’ve ever come across will use this so I asked Dave Winer why via twitter and then 2 things happened

1) Oddly enough eariler in the day before any prompting from me, Dave added to Scripting News’s RSS Feed 2) He replied to my question with this flickr link: http://flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/1876196880/ and he couldn’t have been more correct.

Come on guys, if your going to support a spec, support ALL of it!

As a blogger I hate SEO, they ruin the web. When I search for something I don’t want some stupid sales link at the top of my serp (search engine results page) I want what I searched for! Its becoming more and more common that my search results are getting cluttered with utter crap. Google, Yahoo! or anyone for that matter needs to do something about this.

One thing that will help is that more blogs and social bookmarking sites need to implement nofollow which will hurt these guys! Since its blogs and social bookmarking/news sites that these guys target.

If you want to see how slimy these guys are, watch a “promo” vid for SEO.

The guy that did the above video — Gary Ruplinger — Is taken to task by Anti-SEO Jason Calacanis (Formerly of AOL and founder of Weblogs Inc.)

Way to go Gary… go ahead and piss in the town well (i.e. digg, netscape, google’s index, etc). I mean, finding a bathroom to relieve yourself would take too much work. Forget about the fact that the rest of us drink from that well…. you go ahead and piss in it.

As per that theme song the other day, I’m going to take a new road and if all goes well, never look back! Yesterday I quit my day job to join up with a new startup company that oddly enough isn’t podcast related. I’m not sure what this means for Transistr, but I do know that PopCurrent.com will remain running and be well maintainted still (aka It’s not going anywhere, so keep on popping) but it does mean that I’m going to try something new and fun this year!

Wish me luck!

I’m starting to think that Ruby on Rails is a cult and quickly becoming a religion. It even has its own list of commandments like “Thou shall not write code until I have a test for it” and “Thou shall not repeat thyself” It even has its own leaders like David Heinemeier Hansson that are listened more closely than any evangelist on TV. I don’t really have a point to this blog post, its just an observation. I’m a card carrying member of the cult and proud of it

I’m now at the Portable Media Expo! If your around, you can find me at the PopCurrent or Podiobooks booth or I will have my cell phone 905-399-EVIL(3845)

I have 2 talks that I’m giving. Friday at the Podango Unconference at 3:30 entitled “After iTunes”; the other one is with Evo Terra on the PME show room floor on Saturday at 2PM where we are going to be talking about PodioBooks and PopCurrent. Please come and attend if you can.

Technorati Tags: iPodderX, pme, podcasting, podiobooks, popcurrent, puppy, transistr

I’ve “talked” over email a few times with Robert Scoble — the man, the myth, the legend — but never using more than a keyboard, but that was until tonight Robert and I had a 30 minute conversation about a new site I’ve been working on called PopCurrent. Read what Robert had to say over here, and you can post comments on my blog or on his.

Also on a side note, I’m going to the Portable Media Expo this year? are you going? if so say Hi!

Dave Winer wants the Podcast Directory to live again, and I could not agree more. On his blog he posted this:

If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll happily host the root of a community podcast directory. I might even have a good domain for the purpose. Get it? It’s chow for your pod.

The separation of such a public commodity as podcasting into corporate hands such as Apple and PodShow with no giving back to the community is shameful. While iPodderX/Transistr reads from the OPML directory, it always gave back to it. I’ve spent lots of time working with Libsyn and others to push back out OPML as well to give back to the community.

I like to think of the public directory as the fuel for the podcasting fire, at least in developers terms… the fuel has started to die out, and I don’t want to see that happen. If your interested in hosting a node, or if you have been maintaining your node from the old directory I urge you to contact Dave and see if we can get things going again.

Technorati Tags: adam curry, iPodderX, opml, podcasting, podshow, libsyn, transistr

Transistr (formally known as iPodderX) has a review of news view of the data, but I never got use to reading news in that way. I tried but I just didn’t feel right. Most days I like to go right to a few sources that I like to read carefully then skim the rest really fast. I also (like Scoble) like to be clear of who is saying what, and reading by feed helps do that. Lastly who wants your entertainment news mixed in with your tech(sorry for the digg on digg but it couldn’t be helped:))

Anyways I see how people like the river, and I think its an option we should have; but its not an option I’m planning on using all that much in the near future.

Technorati Tags: iPodderX, transistr, rss