Pardon Our Dust

Pardon our dust or Transform and Transcend as the Maximal’s would say. GeekCast Radio is undergoing some construction. Some things to note, we are not going away or changing content, or going wild, or becoming Vehicons.

We’re working on some listener experience changes. Some a long time coming that we feel will enhance the podcasts, the website, and the organization. 

The Podcasts

As long time listeners or followers of the GCRN may remember, we used to self-host our content. Benefits were we owned the platforms, the RSS feed and the creative control. We were approached by BlogTalkRadio Prime in around April of 2015 to begin the process of loading our entire network to their platform. During that time it became difficult for us to manage the process of porting the shows from the website to them, but also maintaining the backend and frontend of the website. More on that later, but it allowed us the ability to have the episodes all on the platform, free and having some small amount of ads on them to provide for BTR.

In 2016, we discovered that BlogTalkRadio and Spreaker became one under Voxnest. In that transition, they remained separate entities but we were able to port all of our library to Spreaker for a better dashboard instead of a separate one per podcast title. A lot of great features for us, but again more issues in the backend.

In October 2020, it was announced that iHeartRadio would acquire Voxnest, the parent company of Spreaker. iHeart has since also bought Triton Digital from Scripps. In that time, it has become very aggressive in their ad needs compared to the short pre-roll, and post-roll with maybe a mid or two. We’ve run into the issue that even 45 minute programs have 2 pre-rolls, 2-20 mid-rolls, and 2 post-rolls. The mid-rolls depend on the episode length but it makes for a messy experience. Not to mention the ads being played primarily were fed by content that doesn’t align with our brand or content.

Today, May 2024, we’re in process of migrating our entire catalog to RSS.com. This change will enable us to manage it better but also because we’re now paying to have this service, it means no more ads. But, we’ll go back to the donations yearly for costs if people are so inclined. Again, we operated on this model, but I don’t want to go subscription model either. More of, if you like us, help us, but if not, we’ll manage.

The Website

Some may notice here too, with life changes, my time has dwindled on the website updates. Mike has primarily run the show which is fine as he’s kept it afloat. I’ve worked on things as time allows but again, not as I’d like. The backend is somewhat modernized but ultimately is a mess of 15 years old content. We have the feeds, podcasts linking back to when we self hosted, BlogTalkRadio, Spreaker, etc. When we get the new feeds all set up, I’ll be mass updating all of our podcast content and fixing them to play. The downside, we’re going to lose comments on the posts outside of the Top 100 Countdowns. This will likely take a couple of weeks to completely sort out.

The articles, reviews and other video content will still remain untouched but we’ll also be looking into a new theme to highlight the content better. We’ve evolved and so should the site with modern technology. We even last month moved the site from Ionos to Hostinger which has been a great service thus far with very updated and forward thinking attributes that allowed me to cut the plugins in half for security and for functions.

So a lot of changes coming here.

GeekCast Radio and Beyond!

As we continue to evolve for our 15th Anniversary this June, we want to get back to our roots in some regards. More feedback, more conversations, more content you want from us that we’ll also enjoy. We are learning from the past, going a little simpler on things and bringing back the Indie nature and not trying to be one of the big players but a companion in this journey into geekdom. We continue to seek how we can “Unleash The Geek In You!”

Please feel free to let us know what we can do better, what you liked about us in the past and currently. Things that you didn’t care so much about too! It’s all helpful as we navigate the next 5 years of the GCRN.

Thank you all for continuing to follow, listen and geek out with us in this crazy world we live in. We do this for fun but also to geek out with you.

-Steve “Megatron”