Hi everyone.  This is just a note to let you all know that we have implemented some changes to the web-uploader that we wanted you to be aware of.  The majority of the changes are on the back-end, and are part of our preparation for an upcoming network upgrade (details to be announced later in the day).  On the front-end, you should only notice some cosmetic changes, as well as a bit more info on the status of your upload as it progresses.

If you have any issues with the updated uploader, please catch us on the support chat at http://support.libsyn.com, or drop an email to support@libsyn.com.

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Update 9/28 3:06pm

Thanks to those who alerted us that in some cases, publishing new posts was not working properly (for example if an apostraphe was included in the post title).  We've addressed this issue and it should be working as expected now.

Some of you have been requesting this feature, so we took some time to put it together for you.  At the bottom of the Stats tab you'll now see a link to a CSV file, which contains a stats summary for all of your episodes stats are being tracked for.

Click this link and you'll be prompted to download a CSV file, which can be imported into your favorite spreadsheet application and analyzed to your heart's content.

We have more coming down the pipe in terms of the way you view and make sense of your stats, but we thought that this would be a good followup to the recent engine update and interface tweaks.

Please, let us hear any feedback you have.

The fields in the CSV are as follows:

FILE NAME - the name of the file these numbers are for
PUB DATE - the date the episode for that file was published
ALL DL SYND - all syndicated (aggregator) downloads
ALL DL DIR - all direct (non-aggregator) downloads
UNIQUE DL SYND - unique IP downloads (aggregator)
UNIQUE DL DIR - unique IP downloads (non-aggregator)
LES DL SYND - L.E.S. calculated downloads (aggregator)
LES DL DIR - L.E.S. calculated downloads (non-aggregator)

As a precursor to some greater improvements we'll be rolling out over the next few months, we've released some enhancements to the media tab.  First, both archived and current media now appear in the same view.  You can collapse or expand either set of files by clicking its heading.  The media tab now also displays more detailed information about each file.  Click any file name in the list to see details.  We've also enabled group operations, so you can select a number of files and, for example, delete them, or prevent them from archiving.

The second major enhancement in this release is the file uploader.  When you upload files now, you can see the progress of your upload as it happens.

We're hoping you all find these features useful and that they improve your experience while navigating the libsyn system.  Please let us know what you think.  As always, we take your feedback seriously and will use it to help shape the system.

We've been gradually making some improvements to the blog engine over the past weeks, but still believe it to be in dire need of an overhaul. Some recent improvements have been made to the speed the pages load and also module attributes. Check the wiki to see the attributes currently available for the [[blog_pane ]] module. More updates to come. We are also researching different templating engines, looking to possible support an open standards one instead of continuing to roll our own. Any suggestions?

We have implemented support for the new iTunes categories.  You should log into into your "settings" tab in the "itunes" section and make sure that your categories are properly set.  We also now support the three category choices that iTunes allows.  Note that feed validator has not yet adopted the new categories, so it may report your feed as invalid for iTunes until they update their application. 

For people who see the full KTML/WYSIWYG text edit box, and still wish to author HTML in an external tool (like Dreamweaver) and paste it in, you must first click the "W/H" button which flips the view into html mode. Then if you enter code, you can flip back to WYSIWYG mode and see the html rendered. It is important to not paste HTML code on the WYSIWYG side, as the tags will get displayed in your blog page, and look like crap. Example: http://libsyn.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7298#7298 Thanks for the heads up on this everyone who wrote in.

there is now an 'advanced options' section of the post table. This is where we will be putting new fields for everyone to play with. The first is just a big, generic text area where you can put other tags. The problem is you can't put your own custom tags in there yet, because you can't define your own namespaces. I guess that's the next thing to put in there. But in the meantime, you can put creative commons rdf tags in there, clean tags in there, keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 etc...

Hey folks, We've had some requests for automatic RSS feed redirecting, and we've gotten around to putting it in there. To make it work, you'll put the URL you want your feed redirected to in the "public rss feed" setting under basic settings. It's not active yet, though, because I wanted people with a setting in there already to know what was going to happen.

With this setting active, we won't generate a libsyn rss feed anymore, it will just redirect username.libsyn.com/rss to the one set in your settings pane. I'm planning to make this active in about a week, but if you want to have it active sooner, email support, and we'll put you in there sooner. As always, with any questions, email support or post on the forum.

Yours,
- hoopes

As you look around the advanced settings tab of your libsyn account, you will see 2 new checkboxes:

libsyn ranking

public stats

Both of these are upcoming features we are about to debut. As with everything libsyn, we don't want to force anyone into something they're not comfortable with, so we're giving you the option whether you want to be included in our rankings and if you would want to open up your statistics to public knowledge. There are many podcasting directories that wish to use the stats to put together a ranking. We're not sure if we want to do it or not.. so we're leaving it up to you to decide.
You can choose to just be in our ranked list, and not be part of a feed we offer to 3rd party partners. As always, you can trust us that we won't do anything lame with your information.

Thanks to some encouragement from Ray Salinski of iPodderX, a directory of libsyn podcasts are now offered as an OPML feed. This will help to ensure that libsyn podcasts are listed in the iPodder Lemon, iPodderX, iPodder.org, and other directories.

The libsyn directory OPML feed can be found here: http://www.libsyn.com/directory/libsyn.opml

Libsyn users: to be included in this feed login to your account, click the settings tab, and check the box at the bottom of the page "list my podcast in the libsyn directory." Then click "save changes" and you will be ready to rock.

This has been a long requested feature which has finally come to fruition. When a listener posts a comment to your blog page, they are now required to verify that they are a human being by entering a series of numbers that appear in an image above the submit button.

This method is known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Yeah, it's a mouthful, but it's also a widely-used method for preventing spam like we've been seeing on your blog pages. Post a comment here on the support blog to let us know your thoughts on this.

You can now 'Allow comments' when creating a new post... Or, you can choose not to. We realize this isn't a major feature release, but it's been in demand for a while so we just wanted to let everyone know it's available to be used. There is another update coming out soon to address the issue of comment spam. Thanks.