Number of active feeds

Looking through the database today, I saw that there are about 40-50 feeds which have been accessed within the last week. I consider this number to represent the number of current users. I expect this number to pick up as people create feeds of the latest General Conference.

New Years Resolution: Loose Weight!

Happy New Year! To celebrate 2008, we are loosing weight, at least we are loosing the obese URLs from the site. Now all the URLs for feeds and preview pages created by the site are short and simple!

Old URL format:
http://feed.scripturecast.net/r/?start_time=1188579465&ratio=110.5432&volume=1&min_seconds=74715&type=rss2&check=34cd7

New URL format:
http://feed.scripturecast.net/web/1884d4d.html

Hopefully these new URLs will look less scary and be more easily cut and pasted into various pod-catching programs as needed.

The smaller URLs also have allowed us to keep better individual feed statistics. Viewing the "Preview Page" will now also show you which audio files you've already downloaded.

I'm thinking about renaming the "Preview Page" idea to something else like "Web View" (or maybe use both names).

2007 in Review

2007 was a big year for ScriptureCast.net, especially because it was the launch year for the website. (The idea of Scripture Casting was conceived at latest in 2006).

Since I've started taking stats, over 2900 chapters have been downloaded for a total of over 21 days worth of audio.

Meanwhile, the audio for Alma 10 still can't be found on the LDS.org audio website.

I hope 2008 will also be a great year. I hope to have a few extra features available soon. I've even created a special link for you to read the entire Book of Mormon by the end of 2008, starting today (whenever that might be for you.)

Suggestions for features are welcome, just leave a comment!

One hundred thousand seconds

Since I started counting file downloads about 2 weeks ago, there have been over two hundred chapters downloaded, and almost one hundred thousand seconds of audio downloaded. This is over 27 hours of audio, or more than the whole length of the Book of Mormon.

This fantastically makes me happy to see that something I designed might actually be helping people with their scripture study.

Audio file tracking

If you look closely at the source code for the RSS podcast feeds that we create, you will notice that the addresses for the enclosed audio files have changed. They now look something like http://feed.scripturecast.net/a/?id=###. These URLs will redirect to the actual audio file from the source site. They also allow us to keep usage statistics on the audio files.

There is a rate chance that some pod-catchers will re-download the audio files.