If you haven't noticed, Perlcast has been released on a less than reliable schedule as of late. Well, I'm planning on changing that. I'm planning on releasing it on a less-than-reliable schedule from now on.
You may think that I'm kidding. That once I get moved and settled in that I'll get back to the normal weekly schedule. Well, think again.
I hear comments that Perlcast is too long. I hear comments that Perlcast is too short. Well, now you get to pick your Perlcast.
What does that mean? Well, it means that I'm going to try not to make Perlcast one monolithic podcast each week. Instead, I'm going to divide it into sections that are more targeted and easily digestible. Instead of releasing one Perlcast each week, I'm going to try to release multiple.
Basically, right now it seems that Perlcast can be divided into a news segment, an interview segment, and a code sharing segment. Thanks to cog, it looks like there is also room for a weekly 'Best of Perl Monks' segment and a daily or weekly 'Notable Use Perl Journals' segment. My plan is to offer up each of these segments as I (or others from the Perl community) have time to record and produce them. This way we can have weekly news, journals, and Perl monks contributions and get interviews and code talks as soon as they are cleaned up.
Why do this? Because there is no need for you to listen to journal entries if you don't care about them (of course if you are reading this, then that is probably not the case). Because, if you get sick of an interview that is playing and skip to the next track on your audio player, you'll get the next segment of Perlcast without having to try to fast-forward to it (my player doesn't even have a fast-forward). Because you can get more up-to-the-minute coverage. Compiling an hour long show with tracks from interviews and such is hard. Posting a recorded reading of the news is easy. There is no reason for you to wait for the news because I am having trouble cleaning up interview audio.
In the end, I hope that you like the new format. I really didn't ask too many people about it, I just dictated that this is how it's going to be. If you really hate it, let me know. If you really like it, let me know that too... please let me know so that you drown out the haters. Just in case you're wondering, I'm going to keep all of the shows of all types in the 'current.xml' feed and then also break out the shows by type in separate feeds... for instance 'journals.xml' and 'news.xml'. Be patient, the breakouts haven't happened yet.
Also, if anyone has a short clip of audio that they would like to contribute to the cause, I'll be sure to give you some attribution on the website and in a few of the shows. I'm looking to get to the level of IT Conversations and need some intro music that is elevator-esq... or at least not annoying to most.
