New Support Blog Design

Welcome to the newly re-designed Libsyn Support Blog.  This design closely matches the design theme of the upcoming Libsyn.com revamp.  While we really dig the new look we’re especially happy with how it performs and how well it scales down to mobile browsers.

There is one more exciting change coming soon to this support site, we’ll be moving the Libsyn Knowledge Base here.  The current Libsyn KB is part of our helpdesk system and while it’s functional on desktop browsers it’s almost impossible to use on mobile browsers.  Moving the Libsyn KB here to this platform will allow for all the articles and videos to work seamlessly in both desktop and mobile browsers.

iTunes Podcast Submission Holiday Shutdown

We received the following notification from Apple’s Podcast Team today:

iTunes podcast submission system will be offline from approximately December 21, 2012 through December 27, 2012 (Pacific).  During this time, you will be unable to submit new podcasts to the iTunes Store.  New episodes may appear in existing podcasts in iTunes Store slower than usual due to increased seasonal system load.  Full functionality to the iTunes podcast submission system will be restored on or about December 28, 2012.

So if you’ve recently signed up or have started a new show and have yet to submit it for inclusion in the iTunes Store you’ll need to do so within the next day or two or wait until December 28th.  Also during this December 21st – December 28th time window please be aware that it might take longer than normal for new episodes to appear in the iTunes Store.  We’ll update this post if anything changes.

iTunes Store Issues

Over the past few days we’ve received a number of support tickets relating to possible issues with the iTunes Store. At this time we’ve been able to confirm two issues with Apple:

1) Submissions to iTunes are failing usually resulting in an error message.
2) Show listings in the iTunes Store are not updating and don’t show new episodes that have been released

Apple is aware of both issues and they have engineers working on both problems. We’ll update this post as we get new information in and when we get confirmation that the issues are fixed.

UPDATE – Nov. 13 – 2PM EST – We can confirm that the issue with show listings in the iTunes Store not updating has been resolved.

UPDATE – Nov. 14 – 5:30PM EST – Apple has confirmed that the issue they were having with new submissions to the iTunes Store failing have been resolved. If you are still having issues submitting your show please e-mail us: support@libsynsupport.com

Network Maintenance – August 14th

We’ll be doing some maintenance to the network where our main pool of servers is located. This work includes bringing online a pair of new, higher capacity switches. This maintenance should only take 10 minutes in total including about 5 minutes of complete downtime. We’ll be disabling uploads during this to avoid any user from having an upload get cut off.

We’re planning to start the maintenance at 9AM tomorrow, August 14th (EST). We’ll update this post when the maintenance starts and will update it again when the work is done.

Update August 14th 9AM EST – Maintenance beginning shortly.

Stats Maintenance

We’ll be making some changes to our stats system this weekend, you can find more information behind the reasons for the changes here:  http://imake.libsyn.com/libsyn-stats-are-changing-for-the-better.  This maintenance window will last approximately 12 hours on Saturday March, 31st from 12PM – 12AM on Sunday April, 1st.  Beginning at 12PM on Saturday stats processing will be stopped.  You’ll still have access to your existing stats but no new data will be processed until the maintenance window is completed.  During this 12 hour window will be converting the existing data into the new format and structures needed by the new stats processing system.

Once the maintenance has been completed we will turn processing back on and will be keeping a close eye on it to make sure it’s running smoothly.  The new system does process the raw data quite a bit faster than the old one so we expect the stats to get caught up much quicker than they have in the past.

We’ll update this post on Saturday once the maintenance begins and will keep updating it throughout the day until the work is completed.

UPDATE:  March 31st 12PM EST – We’ve started doing the stats maintenance so at this time stats processing is paused and will be paused until this maintenance is completed.

UPDATE:  March 31st 6:30PM EST - The stats maintenance is progressing well, we’re actually about an hour or two ahead of schedule.

UPDATE:  March 31st 8:30PM EST - The stats maintenance has been completed.  We’ve been running on the new stats back-end for roughly 30 minutes now and we’ve yet to see any issues.  The stats processing is already caught up and you should notice greatly improved speeds when using the Statistics module in the Libsyn Dashboard.