Alex Muir

I thought this would turn out to be the toughest part (see part 1 - the website ). Four people, thousands of miles apart, recording over Skype. With a host who hasn't hosted anything since I recorded 'radio shows' on a tape deck aged about 9. But it went very smoothly - The credit for this goes to a) my guests and b) Skype.

Guests

I had about 40 people register as being interested in guesting. I didn't have a great deal of time to research people, so I picked people from their profiles to suit the top stories I thought we'd discuss. I also wanted a mix of people. Broadly I am going to aim for the following:

• Location: 1 SF, 1 Other US, 1 Non-US. As someone pointed out in a HN comment, it's easier to follow a Podcast with multiple accents. I loved Matt Brace's Texas accent in our first show, and Luzius Meisser's Swiss in our second.
• Background: 1 YC, two others - not entirely sure yet - I don't want it to be all YC, and I'm averse to people already knowing each other before guesting.

I was terrified that I was exceptionally lucky with my first guests. I edited nothing out - every word they said is untouched and uncropped - all three were outstanding speakers. But the second show also worked really well, so hopefully the formula is there.

Content

I don't know if I have the content quite right yet. Two major topics seems to be about right in terms of length. It's hard to know which stories to go with. In the first show we talked about Kickstarter, the Raspberry Pi and briefly about Instagram. We also discussed HTML5 vs Native apps. I cut this out because I wanted to keep to a 30 minute podcast - on reflection that might be an arbitrary number. I'm open to suggestions here: Should I just release however long is usable? Stick to 30 minutes religiously? Or release a 30 minute one, and then a 'bonus extra' of the rest?

I emailed everyone the day before with the topics.

Scheduling

Timezones are an issue. I googled 'timezone group scheduling' and found Doodle, which worked extremely well. (Although I did have to manually add 48 separate timeslots) 5pm in the UK is 9am in SF. London and San Francisco were my two geographical extremes - if I go further East than Europe then I am going to be in trouble. I had a 48 hour window to find a mutual timeslot - and in the end we had a two options. We recorded at 6pm UK/10am PDT.

Recording

We held a group Skype. Everyone recorded their own end of the conversation using whatever tool was to hand (Audacity or Garageband). Some people used Audio Hijacker to isolate down to just their own microphone, but I seemed to be able to just hit record in Garageband. I was in fear that my computer would freeze and I'd lose the conversation and the whole recording. In future I might divide the chat into two to mitigate this risk.

I also recorded the group call as a backup in case someone's recording didn't work out. Then everyone Dropboxed (Tangent - using a company name as a verb = >$1bn valuation) their files to me and I lined them all up. At the start we said 1..2..3.. and then clapped so that I could sync things later on in editing.

Skype introduced quite a lag - perhaps one second. Having separate tracks let me remove this lag by realigning them.

Something that I hadn't appreciated, and that I need to work on, was the delay that people left by waiting to see if anyone else spoke - sometimes five seconds of silence. I need to ask people by name more, maybe editing this out later.

I tried Garageband for editing but couldn't figure out the UI at all, so I went to Audacity and it worked brilliantly.

Once I'd realised I could sync-lock tracks together there was no stopping me. I sliced and diced my own track until I sounded coherent, chopped out most of the silences. Rearranged answers to make them more coherent. I silenced closing doors and squeaking chairs, tightened up pauses, and removed a lot of mmmms (virtually all my own). It felt amazing being able to change what people say - far more magic than photoshopping. It is easy to remove single words from even quickly spoken sentences. Editing took about two hours.

Then I threw in a bit of a jingle at the start.

Hardware:

A Macbook Air, Some headphones and a £40 microphone from Maplin (A UK equivalent of Radio Shack). I'm not sure anything more is necessary. I think the other guys all had good quality microphones too, probably far better than my own.

Lessons:

I sat on the idea for almost a year. For no reason other than inertia. There's no magic to it. Just get off your backside and start doing something - I'm delighted for a first attempt and hopefully it'll just continue to improve.

Last week I recorded HNpod, my first podcast. A few people asked about how I got from idea to finished product so quickly. I’m writing two posts about the process. This is the first post about the website and distribution, the next will be about recording and the logistics of the show. The post was the #1 story on HN for quite a few hours, so there might be some interesting stuff about traffic.

The Stack

The site is built on Rails. Rails is perhaps a bit heavyweight for such a simple site, but I know my way around it, enjoy using it, and it will make any future features easy to add. I'm using Apache, mod_passenger and Ubuntu 11.04. Deploying my first rails app was a nightmare, but now I'm in the swing of it and have got to grips with capistrano. I'd recommend anyone getting started with Rails to battle through the initial deployment nightmares, rather than opt straight for Heroku (not that I've ever used it).

Hosting

Hosted on a linode 512mb VPS. $20 a month. I have a couple of other, largely dormant apps, on the same VPS. Even at peak traffic (#1 story on HN, ~ 130 concurrent visitors, 16 Mb/s traffic) the server barely went above 12% CPU usage. I'm just hosting the MP3 on my Linode for now - I have 200GB of transfer a month and the first episode has used 69 GB so far. I might move over to S3 at some point, but since I'm paying for that Linode bandwidth I might as well use it.

I can't recommend Linode highly enough. I've used them for about three years and the process goes like this. Order server. Pay money. Never hear from them again. Perfection. The Linode Library taught me most of what I've learned about sysadmin.

Features

There's nothing fancy in the features.

I added the applaud functionality as a way to receive feedback on guests. Later I might add a weekly email for guests themselves to receive some feedback - "You were applauded X times last week for your appearance on Z". The downside of applauding was that it prevented easy page caching of each episode page - where I anticipated most traffic. I launched with no caching and it wasn't a problem. My contingency if the server was overloaded would have been to either scale up the Linode, or remove applaud buttons and enable page caching. Lesson: Don't worry, it might never happen. The voting is simply based off of IP addresses now - maybe in future I'll take a hash of IP and User Agent.

I'm hoping that guests will come back in future shows, so I've linked them to each show so that it's all neatly tied together.

Distribution

What I did right

Getting onto iTunes was an early priority. To do that, I needed to create a namespaced RSS feed and submit it to Apple for approval. Rails has an RSS/XML Builder that made this a breeze. iTunes also recommended a mammoth 1200x1200 image as a show icon. I wasn't sure how long approval took - and I didn't want to submit with dummy content in case I was perma-rejected. I submitted as soon as the Podcast was ready and hoped I'd have approval in a couple of hours. I didn't, so I just launched anyway. Approval came about an hour after posting on HN - I like to think a reader from Apple pushed it along, but it was probably just the process. Sadly there's no way to see how many people are subscribed through iTunes.

For in-page playing, I opted for Mixcloud - and have had 1,349 listens on Mixcloud to date. I met the guys who founded this site back in 2007 at Minibar in London. I remember co-founder Nico Perez telling me they wanted to build the 'Youtube of extended audio content'. I was blown away by the guys but music startups seemed like a dead-end game - I wasn't overly enthusiastic. They've stuck to their vision like glue, and built a brilliant startup and community along the way. And to top it all, I think they may have bootstrapped virtually the whole journey living in a disused warehouse and eating pasta.

I'm also offering direct MP3 downloads. Bandwidth used on the site was 65GB over the first two days. This includes iTunes listens as iTunes podcasts are self-hosted. So far that's around 2,428 downloads, plus 1,349 listens on Mixcloud, plus Youtube.

I'd put a Mailchimp signup widget on the page when I first floated the idea. The mailing list now has almost 400 emails of people who have signed up in the last week.

What I missed

Youtube. I don't really understand yet why people listen to Podcasts on Youtube, but it seems that they do. It seems something to do with using the queuing. I totally missed this channel. It's a bit of a pain as I have to encode a video with the show logo as one long still using iMovie. I also seemed to get caught by a 15 minute cap on uploads. I will succeed next week.

Rumours of RSS death are greatly exaggerated. I didn't make the RSS feed prominent with a link on the page and people complained. There are lots of Podcast clients other than iTunes and I completely missed this.

Other Podcast networks. There's a Zune marketplace. I have yet to actually get into it, because I couldn't create a Live account. I overlooked these - if it's easy to submit I'll do it, but hopefully the RSS feed will suffice for everyone else.

Design

I used Twitter Bootstrap for design, but avoided the more obvious components (the top navbar) and changed the colour scheme using three LESS variables.

There's growing criticism of sites using Bootstrap and in a lot of cases this is fair - but the base structure and components of Bootstrap are invaluable (things such as the grid, typography, forms and tables). There's no excuse for launching a site that looks exactly the same as every other - it's really easy to change the defaults, and just a couple of changes make a world of difference. You seem to get a lot of bang for your time by doing the following:

• Change the link color. This also changes the colour of primary buttons. (20 seconds)

@linkColor: #fd7416; a:hover { text-decoration: none; }

• Either don’t use the topbar, or at least use a different background to the default black. (30 seconds)

@navbarBackground: #F3F3F3; @navbarBackgroundHighlight: #fefefe; @navbarText: @grayDarker; @navbarLinkColor: @grayDarker; @navbarLinkColorHover: @black; .navbar .brand { color: black; }

The Fontawesome icons look great (they may swiftly become overused), and I have a simple helper that I use in all my apps:

# the HTML markup for an icon def icon_tag(icon_name) content_tag 'i', '', class: "icon-#{icon_name}" end

I've used Markdown throughout because I just LOVE its simplicity compared with HTML or, god forbid, TinyMCE or similar.

Still to do

• There's no mobile layout, and I haven't quite got my head around responsive design yet.
• Comments. I tried to save effort by leaving comments in a HN thread. This didn't seem to work - the comments were all about the Podcast and not the content. But it may be that this was just because it was the first show. I'll leave this for the next one and then assess whether I should put comments on the actual show page.

I'd like to finish by thanking my three guests, Matt Brace, Chad Etzel, and Mike Mahemoff. The guests made the first show, and they will continue to do so.

In 2007 it looked quite possible that the Blackberry would continue to prosper.  Units were shipping, having a Blackberry was a status symbol, they were everywhere.

But how many of those sales figures were people with a choice?  How many were people who got them from work?  Or who didn’t have the upfront cash to buy an iPhone?  Because the truth is that people with the choice chose the iPhone - all iPhone buyers made the choice.  Many of Blackberry’s users were GIVEN them.

We’re witnessing a similar situation now with Macbooks.  Anyone choosing their own laptop (with the proviso that they have enough money) is buying a Macbook.  Businesses are carrying on giving out PCs, but their staff want Macbooks.  And just as it was thought that Big Business would never dish out iPhones, so it’s thought that no Blue Chip company will hand out Macbooks.  But they will.

I believe this is a good predictor of the future direction of things.  Look at what people choose and you’ll see what is superior and in demand.  Don’t listen to what people argue is better - look at what they do.

Supermarkets are a brilliant example of this.  In towns where there’s only one supermarket it reveals nothing that 100% of people shop there.  It could be shit, they’d still rack up sales.  The metric we want to be looking at is where people are CHOOSING that supermarket out of a range of viable options.  (I believe that long-term this may be a problem for Tesco.)

Opportunities abound where people WANT a choice, but one doesn’t exist.

I invariably mistime my walk to the bus stop and miss the bus. In the morning it’s not an issue, but on my way home at one or two in the morning I am faced with a twenty minute wait. And it has been -11 Celsius for the last week in Berlin, with an ice-cold, chilling wind.

So I set off walking; it’s only a 25 minute walk home anyway. After fifteen minutes my hands and ears are freezing, and my nose has gone numb so I can’t tell if there’s snot frozen to the end of it. I start to think about how long I could survive in such temperatures.

I am wrapped up in good clothes - Primark’s finest, no less. A coat, jumper and shirt. Gloves, if I’ve remembered, and sturdy boots. But I know that 68 years ago, not far away, families of Jews were standing outside in this same weather, stripped naked, heads shaved, half-starving, for ten hours. Waiting to be admitted into Auschwitz.

It isn’t possible to imagine what those people went through. Of course they were killed - gassed naked and freezing after neatly piling up their clothes. Bulldozed into pits like worthless meat. But people are killed all the time. Many countries kill criminals. Criminals kill victims. Our military kills other soldiers, and plenty of civilians. Tsunamis come and drown 15,000 Japanese people. People being killed is reality, as much a fact of life as death. There’s nothing to be done about that, and I don’t lose sleep over it.

What is worse is cruelty and evil. Forcing familes into crates with no food and water. Leaving them for days with nothing. Separating women, children and babies, and beating them, naked and screaming, into gas chambers. Leaving men knowing that their loved ones have been humiliated and then killed. Taking every single possession and item of clothing from those men and leaving them with nothing, barely even a name. Working them in rags, in the freezing cold, with starvation rations, until they are no longer able to move. And then killing them.

Human nature has not changed since the Holocaust. It’s the same human nature that was there before - in Nanjing in 1937, and since - in Rwanda and Bosnia in 1994. A Holocaust has already happened in my lifetime, and will certainly happen again.

It gives me strength as I walk home to know that I can survive a 25-minute stroll in chilly weather with a full belly. Back to my heated flat, and all my possessions. With the knowledge that the people I love are safe and secure. I am thankful that I am here, now, at this time.

My flat here is in a block that was built in around 1900. The communal areas haven’t changed since then - everything is original, and run-down. As I walk through the lobby towards the winter sunshine, heading into work, I often consider that this view is exactly what the occupants of my block saw in 1944. The sound of the door closing, the smell of bins and mould, the echo of footsteps on tiles.

I know that some of those people looked at this view, then walked out of the door and never returned. And I know that others walked out of that door and carried out evil tasks. Evil is not far away, and we must be watchful.

I thought hard about whether to write this post. It’s a depressing subject, and not one that consumes me. But it’s important to remember, just occasionally. One of the books in my flat is Survival in Auschwitz by Italian Jewish chemist Primo Levi. I could only manage the first couple of dozen pages, because more than a few pages at a time is overwhelming. At some point I’ll buy it and finish it. But not now.

My daily bus commute here in Berlin has been bringing back memories of school - the last time I regularly caught a bus.  And the debacle that is Megaupload / Kim Schmitz has got me thinking about making rational decisions to break the rules.

I was in trouble a lot when I was at school.  I spent great deal of time in detention, on report cards, suspended and then eventually expelled.  Generally I wasn’t particularly badly behaved - I’d get caught on the odd minor criminal escapade but for the most part I was in detention for either being late, not turning up at all, or not doing homework.  I also slept through a huge number of classes, but I don’t recall being punished for this.

The system worked like this: getting a Wednesday meant staying behind from (if I remember correctly) 3.30 to 4.30.  It’s incredible to think this was only an hour - it felt like an eternity.  The biggest pain with a Wednesday was missing the bus home with everyone else at the end of the day.  The journey home was often the best part of the day.  That was mitigated by the fact that often the people I most had fun with were also in detention, so we just went home at 4.30 instead.

A Saturday was 10am to 1pm on a Saturday morning.  This was a much more serious punishment and I remember it felt like a room full of real miscreants as opposed to just disorganised people.  Some kids hid detention from their parents, but this was much harder with a Saturday - one had to wear uniform.  I don’t recall particularly caring - although I couldn’t go to the computer fair at Bowlers if I had a Saturday.

Saturdays dragged.  Big time.  An important part of my survival technique was to buy a bag of crisps (Seabrook Crinkle-Cut), crush them up into little bits, and then pour them loose into my blazer pocket.  This avoided both the crunch of eating big crisps and the rustle of the bag.  Hygiene wasn’t really an issue - I had two and half hours to find absolutely every last crumb in there.

When I had a Minidisc player, I would trail an earphone up my sleeve and listen to music while pretending to rest my head.  Detentions were in silence so I was always paranoid about the volume.

I can’t particularly remember what we did in detention - I think it was generally up to the teacher who was rostered to take it.  Sometimes we were just to do homework, others we were given punishment essay titles.  I think some of these essays were probably my finest work at school - sadly I never saw them afterwards, or got any feedback.

I remember two detentions farily vividly.  Mr Swales, a bear of a man with a huge personality who taught Religious Studies, spent one Wednesday explaining the mechanics of farting.  I seem to remember the gist of it was that the heavier, more toxic fart particles took much longer to reach a recipient’s nose than the light smelly ones.  I think the discussion was brought on by him farting exceptionally loudly.

There was also a relatively young teacher who had prepared a questionnaire for us all to complete on why we were there, what we thought of detention and so on.  It was an easy detention and also I remember feeling like someone actually cared about what I thought.

Detentions were a deterrent for me for a while - when I was young I didn’t like being stuck in an empty school with the older troublemakers.  As I got older I didn’t really have anything to fear and they became an inconvenience.  In the end though, I just had so many that they became a fixture in my life.

There was a system whereby being given three Wednesday detentions in a single week would result in a Saturday detention, and three Saturday detentions in a term would lead to a suspension.  I got caught under both of these.  Eventually I had to be suspended.

Being suspended didn’t bother me in the slightest, though I recognised that it put in about the worst 1% of the school - my mum was furious but I didn’t really care.  I can’t remember if I even actually got the time off school - I probably did.  It was three days - and I had to come back at the start of the holidays to make it up.  That was fairly gruelling.  And there were probably only five or six of us there from the whole school.  Three memories from these days stick in my mind - the porters getting us to move the assembly chairs around, and a kid climbing out of a window onto the fifth-floor roof of the New Building.

The third memory saddens me, both in its nature and my failure to do anything.

Mr NP Dunn, a design teacher and house master, was supervising.  For some reason, we moved from our usual room across the school grounds to another building.  One of the kids, whose name I still remember and who was even more hapless than me, was told to carry a box of Dunn’s papers.  Somehow, and I’m certain it wasn’t deliberate, he dropped some of the papers off the box and onto the wet ground.  Dunn was furious, shouted at him, and slapped him hard across the face.  I remember it vividly, it shocked me to the core.  I believe these were exam papers that he was marking, but it was wholly unacceptable - it was a slap of revenge and fury, rather than justice or punishment.  I did nothing, and I don’t recall ever mentioning it.

One of the things I appreciated at my school was that teachers enjoyed more freedom than was the case at other schools.  I remember a PE teacher picking someone up by his ears, another teacher who casually threw rocks around and quite happily gripped people.  I was grateful for this, and never wanted to be the sort of whinging ninny who would kick up a fuss about health and safety bullshit.  But Dunn’s actions were different and I didn’t recognise it at the time.

What do I think about detentions?  Well they worked with the vast bulk of kids - probably most never even served one.  And to an extent they worked with me - I didn’t want to go in, but once any sense of fear, embarrassment and inconvenience was gone, I didn’t care any more.

They were certainly a missed opportunity to get to grips with some of us.  The kids in detention were some of the wittiest, wiliest and sharpest around.  I think something positive could have been done with the bulk of us in such small groups.

What they did though, was taught me that it’s easy to make a rational decision to break the rules when the punishment is already clear.  Should I do this homework for two hours tonight, or serve one hour on Wednesday night?  That’s a hugely important lesson, and one that I think a lot of people never learn - and luckily for society, I guess.