Episode 192 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week we have the full current panel, Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict), Stephan Segraves (@ssegraves), Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy) and Kevin Dees (@kevindees) who are joined first by previous hosts Kevin Yank (@sentience) and Brad Williams (@williamsba) and then later by producers Karn Broad (@WebKarnage) and Carl Longnecker.
Download this Episode
You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
SitePoint Podcast #192: The End(MP3, 02:11:04, 125.8MB)
Episode Summary
In this, the very last episode of the SitePoint Podcast, the extended panel of hosts and producers take a reminisce through their memories of the four years doing the podcast, what it has meant to them and how they will look back on it.
Interview Transcript
Patrick: Hello and welcome to the final SitePoint podcast. I’m Patrick O’Keefe, and I’m joined by my usual cohosts, Kevin Dees, Louis Simoneau and Stephan Segravess. Gentlemen, as Michael Jackson once said, “This is it.” How’s it going?
Louis: Hey, guys.
Stephan: Hi.
Patrick: Kevin, do you want to say something?
Kevin Dees: I don’t know what to say.
Patrick: Forget it. We’ll just skip you then. All right. So, we have quite a show planned for you today. We’re not going to do the stories. We’re not going to do the spotlights. We’ve kind of wrapped that up on the last episode for the final time. Instead, we’re going to be looking back at the past four years of the SitePoint podcast. We’re going to bring on some familiar faces from the past. Like former host, Brad William and Kevin Yank. And, just have a lot of fun reminiscing about the show, where it started, how we made the journey and finally where it ends up at.
Stephan: Sounds like fun.
Patrick: And without further ado, let’s go ahead and get this show on the road. We now have Brad Williams and Kevin Yank on our show with us back again. Brad, Kevin, welcome back.
Brad: Hello.
Kevin Yank: Hello.
Brad: How’s it going?
Patrick: It’s going good. You know this is the first time, we’ve had all six current or former SitePoint hosts on a single Skype call, on a single show, so hopefully, it doesn’t break the Internet with all this great awesomeness, manliness, and handsomeness.
Kevin Yank: It’s like we never left. It’s the last one. What have you guys been talking about?
Patrick: Nothing really. We’re just going to. We were waiting to talk about anything until we got you guys on here. So, I was just looking at the topics right now.
Kevin Yank: No, I don’t mean this episode. I mean all this time since we left. Fill me in.
Patrick: I don’t know. I don’t know. What happened? Well, there’s Internet Explorer. Right?
Louis: Mostly Internet Explorer. Yeah.
Patrick: Mostly Internet Explorer.
Brad: So, you picked up right where we left off is what you’re saying.
Patrick: Exactly. It’s all the same. So, you know, you mentioned where we left off and so you know, I think it’s fitting to start like where the show started and I put together a little bit of a timeline, back in the SitePoint forum. It’s a private forum there which I still have access to for probably a limited time. Pull out those spread. So, the first mention of the SitePoint podcast was June 27th, 2007. Okay? And Brad started a thread to ask if there was any interest in a site point podcast, not the SitePoint podcast but just a site point podcast. Brad, do you remember doing that? And what kind of your thought process was when you kind of had the initial idea?
Brad: I do. Yeah. I mean it seems like such a world difference back then too, because I mean five years. I’m sure if any one of you guys or any one of the listeners think back what they were doing five years ago, it was probably a little bit different than what they’re doing today if not significantly different. For me, it’s significantly different.
So, yeah, so I was actually doing a–well, when Patrick invited me on the show and kind of told me what was going on last week, I kind of went back in the archives and did a little digging too because I had forgotten how long this show had been around. And since you mentioned 2007, I mean that was, it was like a completely different time in my life of what I was doing. You know, I was IT director of successful e-commerce company. I had a nice cushy job.
And then, you know, basically right around the time that we started the first episode was released, I moved to New Jersey. Basically left my job, moved to New Jersey, decided to start my own business. You know, it was pretty big change for me and it pretty much evolved around with the podcasts because the first podcast was just a few months after I moved to New Jersey. It was kind of an interesting timeline how the podcast lines up with that transition in my life, but at that time I was listening to a lot of different podcasters. There was a lot of tech podcasts out there. I really enjoyed listening to them all day long.
That’s kind of where the idea came from, was hey, why doesn’t SitePoint have one? I mean there’s a lot of obviously a lot of really talented people on SitePoint from the staff to the community. So, I knew it could benefit from one for sure. So, that’s kind of where the idea came from.
Patrick: And then I looked farther ahead and I found in November 2007, you started a thread to organize that podcast and for various reasons, jumping through different hoops, whether on our end or SitePoint’s end, or whatever, it didn’t really get going until July 11, 2008 when you started a thread to get it back on the burner. I don’t even remember what happened in a year’s time, but I don’t even know what the delay was for a whole year. Do you?
Kevin Yank: I guess a podcast is a hard thing to get off the ground because you got to get a group of people all together to all have that critical mass of enthusiasm all at once and yeah, I guess it did take a year to wrangle the people, for people to let it slide and then feel the frustration of it not happening and then jump back on it. So, I don’t think a year’s out of the question for getting something like that off of the ground.
Brad: It definitely takes a lot more work than people realize. And even more work than I realized when it first started. I was like, “Oh, they just sit around and talk about it. That’s easy.” Right? Well, it’s definitely more thought has to go into it than just jumping in front of a mike and talking. And I think we all learned that because I didn’t have really any experience podcasting when we started this. Kevin and Patrick, you guys might have had some experience or no? Or Stephan?
Kevin Yank: No. Next to none. I had all the enthusiasm in the world, but none.
Patrick: I hosted a show about community management for like 27, 30 episodes and that was about it. So, beyond that I hadn’t done any podcasting and I really . . .
Brad: So you were really. Patrick, you’re the most seasoned out of the group.
Kevin Yank: What am I saying? I had done some podcasting before. I did a little show with a friend of mine named John Corry. The show was called Lost Out Back. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the SitePoint podcast. But the site is still up. It’s a lostoutback.com and it was kind of a funny, I like to think it was funny, comedy show about two guys living in Australia who are not from Australia. John was from Ireland. I was from Canada at the time and we were both dealing with the culture shock of learning to live in Australia and we did about ten episodes on that. So, it was short-lived, but I think we burned brightly at the time.
Patrick: Is you mentioning that podcast sort of like somebody mentioning their first web site on GeoCities?
Kevin Yank: The first web site on what?
Patrick: Is he mentioning that podcast sort of like you mentioning, sort of someone mentioning they’re first web site on geo cities.
Kevin: Yeah. Exactly. It felt that way.
Brad: The web site looks like you’re first web site on GeoCities.
Kevin: It’s still running on WordPress, and I’ve kept it up to date all this time.
Patrick: Yeah. It’s funny because a baby takes nine months, but it’s reasonable that a podcast would take a year. But anyway, we, you know, just to follow that timeline. In October of 2008, we all agreed to do a show on Mondays at 7:00 p.m. I thought that was funny because we kept that time slot for the entire run of the show. Mondays at 7:00 p.m. through all the different hosts.
Kevin Yank: Really? That’s amazing.
Brad: That is. I didn’t realize that it’s stayed the same either, I can remember actually. I actually don’t remember what day it was on. But then you said that and it reminded me. I’m surprised you guys hadn’t changed it at some point.
Patrick: Well, it’s been convenient for everyone except Louis.
Louis: What’s that?
Patrick: Mondays, the time we record, has been convenient for everyone except you. It interrupts your work day.
Louis: Yeah. Well, I think it would have been the same with Kevin. It’s fine when it’s winter here and summer there because then it’s 9:00 a.m. here.
Patrick: Right.
Louis: Which is fine. But when the daylight savings switches then it’s 11:00 a.m. here which is in the middle of the work day. When I was working at SitePoint, that was really fine because I was, you know, it sort of fit in with the other stuff I was doing because I was doing a lot of web content to do with all this news as well. So, you know the research kind of fell into the same vibe. And I think that was probably the same with Kevin as well.
Kevin Yank: Yeah. For sure.
Louis: Because you left the show shortly after moving to [inaudible 00:07:38] full-time.
Kevin Yank: Yeah.
Brad: I remember the scheduling was always a bit interesting because there was, well, when we first started it was Patrick, Stephan and myself were in the U.S, and then Kevin was in Australia. So, we’re recording in the evening our time and Kevin’s early, not early morning, but the morning of the next day. So, which was basically, like you said, 9:00, 10:00 a.m. in a work day. On a Tuesday.
Kevin Yank: Yeah. That’s why Louis and I are the only two who sound awake.
Brad: You’re trying to get back to work and we’re trying to go to bed.
Patrick: Yeah and also you always had the next day’s news always handy.
Louis: Yes. Exactly.
Patrick: That’s the last time.
Brad: I think we used that joke every week for the first 100 episodes, but it’s kind of cool, or highlights a cool thing which is technology. You know, like even, I mean this was four years ago that we did this. I mean, just a few years prior to that it would have been really hard if not impossible to do it. You know, cross-continent like we did for as long as we did. So, I think it’s just really cool knowing that we were actually doing that.
A lot of people, I’m sure you guys probably heard the feedback too, they all thought we were at the same place at some point because we do that recording locally and then mash it together. So, the quality comes across way better than like a straight Skype recording.
Kevin Yank: That’s falling out of fashion. A lot of the podcasts I listen to now, they record over Skype and you can hear the drop out sometimes and you can definitely tell that these people are not in the same place. I think it’s a testament to the quality, the ongoing quality of the SitePoint podcast that we continue to record locally and do an edit after the fact.
Louis: I can’t image. It just seems crazy to me to not do that. But I mean, if you don’t have the luxury of being able to have someone working as an editor and no one who is doing the show is particularly savvy with audio editing, I guess it’s probably a bit of a challenge to get us sounding even half way coherent.
Patrick: Yeah and it’s really a credit to the rapport that we’ve all had one with another. First, you know, when Louis joined and Kevin Dees joined, you knowing, having the ongoing rapport but also a credit to Carl Longnecker and Karn Broad who have produced the show, edited the show and made it sound like we are half way coherent and in the same basic vicinity.
Kevin Yank: Shout out to the producers.
Kevin Dees: Absolutely.
Brad: Seriously. That’s tricky. Again, I’ve done some podcasts after SitePoint and, you know, we’ve never had the luxury of having a producer or someone to help with the audio. So it’s always been, like you said Kevin, kind of straight from Skype, and there is that quality loss from doing that, but at the end of the day if it’s between that and not doing it at all then, you know, people do it, which if fine, but you’re right. There is that quality loss.
Louis: Yeah. I was amazed the first few times I heard the show, especially some interview shows, where I felt like I was kind of struggling to ask my questions and keep it together without umm- ing and ah-ing too much, and then I hear the recording after the edits and it sounds like a completely different person, because it was so, so cleanly edited that I sound like I’ve got it totally together. Yeah. It was pretty impressive.
Kevin Yank: We need a super-cut of Louis falling apart.
Patrick: That guys sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.
Louis: Sorry, what’s that?
Kevin Yank: We need a super cut of Louis ums, and ahs, and falling apart.
Patrick: Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.
Louis: Exactly. I’m sure if you cut it all together from the time I’ve been on the show it would be something ridiculous, like a day of umm, ah, umm, ah.
Kevin Yank: What’s next on the timeline?
Patrick: Well, October 15, 2008 we recorded the pilot episode, and what we did was actually we released it, and that was just me, Brad, Stephan. We recorded the pilot together as sort of a test, and released it for the SitePoint forum staff, the SitePoint staff. I don’t really remember too much about that. Stephan, do you have any memories about those times?
Stephan: Man, I have no recollection whatsoever of the first show.
Brad: This is pre-first show. This is the pilot.
Patrick: So, we did the pilot. Yeah, yeah, the pre-first show. Yeah. I don’t know if you ever actually released that, but it was just us three, and we put that out for the SitePoint staff, and then Kevin Yank got on board.
Kevin Yank: I remember hearing it. I remember Brad, you were the MC for that show?
Brad: I think so.
Patrick: Yeah.
Brad: I quickly was replaced. I was happily quickly replaced.
Patrick: You were the person who said hello, as I like to call it. The person who says hello for the…I think the first few episodes, and then we kind of slotted it over to Kevin Yank, but…
Brad: Honestly, that’s a much better fit…I’m not the MC type of person, even if I do shows now I generally don’t like being that person. I like to kind of sit on the side and make comments rather than actually run the show. So, I mean when Kevin took that over I was happy, and Kevin, I mean you knocked it out of the park. You were a natural, and Patrick too. I mean Patrick I remember you did quite a few shows too. You guys are both, I think, naturally good at kind of running a show like that, which is a talent I’m lacking.
Patrick: You’re too humble.
Kevin Yank: I remember when Shayne Tilley, who was the marketing manager at SitePoint at the time, he came to me. As marketing manager, he was monitoring the forum and what the community was talking about. At the time, I had moved into kind of a development role. It would’ve been around the time that I was working on the SitePoint reference site and things of that nature.
He came to me. He said “Listen, what’s your interest in being involved in a SitePoint podcast?”, and I said “I think it would be awesome. I had been saying for years that SitePoint needs a podcast, but I don’t think I can do it all by myself.” He said “Well, have a listen to this thing. It’s a pilot from the forum, and I think the guys could use a SitePoint voice, but this is happening with or without us. So, the question is, Kev, do you want to be on board, or do you want to watch from the sidelines?” So, I said “I totally want to be on board.” To this day, I still feel kind of guilty that you guys had the energy and the drive to get this off the ground, and I sort of jumped on board after the cart was already in motion.
Patrick: You know, it’s funny you should mention that because Shane, I asked Shane for a comment for the show, and he sent me an email, and this seems like a good time to share his remarks, because it’s directly relevant to what you said. He said “I would like to pass on, not my sadness that the show is coming to an end, but how proud I’ve been of everyone that contributed to the show over the years. I still remember a meeting early on a Saturday morning for me, where the show was pitched by the original cast, the original theme music, the look on Kev’s face when I mentioned we were going to do a podcast without him. I could go on.
In the office, we had been talking about a podcast for about 12 months before you contacted me, and nothing had happened. When I went into the office the Monday after I approved the first episode, there was a look of horror on Kev’s face when I told him we were going to start a podcast without him. Suffice to say, he emailed you guys within a few minutes.”
Brad: And the rest is history.
Kevin Yank: Yup.
Patrick: You know, different memories. Yeah, the rest is history. He says “190 plus episodes later, all I can say is congratulations at the end of a job well done.” He mentioned something about crickets, and maybe Brad, I don’t know if you remember this. He says “If I could make a request, can you please play the cricket sound effect that was oh so controversial many, many shows ago. The crickets, I can’t remember the actual episode, but it was around the time of the election. Kevin made a comment about it, and there was nothing but silence from the other host. Kev came to me with two versions, one with a cricket sound effect. After the uncomfortable silence, one without. Suffice to say, we went with the sound effect.” I have no idea what that’s about.
Kevin Yank: It would have been in the first five episodes for sure, back when we were still stressing about little editing choices like that.
Brad: Yeah. I remember that, but I couldn’t tell you what episode that was in. I do remember crickets getting-it wasn’t live though, right? It was in a post production the crickets were put in, I think.
Kevin Yank: I think so. Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Patrick: Right. Yeah. We’ve never been technical enough to really have a sound board.
Kevin Yank: If there are any SitePoint podcast superfans out there who can figure out what episode and time code that occurred at, I’m sure we would love to hear it again for old time’s sake.
Patrick: Yeah, definitely. So, we recorded episode one on October 27, 2008 and released it November 10, 2008. So, that’s how it got started.
Brad: You know, I was listening to the first episode earlier today, which is a blast from the past. You guys should check it out. You cringe only a few times, you know, it’s like. Obviously, it’s episode number one, but one of the funniest lines was in the first few minutes. I was kind of talking about what to expect and how the show is going to go in the format, and I think I mentioned that the show will be 30 minutes in length, 30 minutes. Every other week we’ll be 30 minutes. We’ll try our best to hit that mark. I don’t think we ever had a show come anywhere close to 30 minutes. Maybe the first one, and even that’s over 30 minutes.
Kevin Yank: I remember that was my suggestion. I said we’re planning this podcast. If there’s one thing wrong with all the podcasts out there is that they waffle on and on for hours. I’m not going to name any names, but there are definitely podcasts out there that take 20 minutes to get past the sort of “Hey! We’re back for another show,” and you don’t even get to here word one about what they’re actually going to talk about until 15, 20 minutes into the thing. So, I was determined the SitePoint podcast would not be like that, and I think despite our lengthy run lengths over the years, I think we’ve always been good about getting straight into the show.
Louis: Yeah. I think it’s been great for that, and I agree with you. I struggle with some, you know, podcasts that are more amateur productions like ours, a lot of times for the same reason. Yeah, I think that even in those shows, I think the longest we did…I don’t know if, Patrick, did you post stats on this? You pulled a lot of stats for today’s show. So, do you know what the longest show we did was?
Patrick: Oh, man. That’s a good one. No, I don’t know what that one is. Dang it. Darn you. If you had asked us for the podcast stats can’t you…
Kevin Yank: Cut it out. Edit it out.
Brad: There’s some that were like an hour and a half plus I remember.
Kevin Yank: Yeah, for sure.
Patrick: Really?
Louis: That would’ve been before my time. I think the longest we did with me would’ve been an hour or ten or something.
Patrick: Yeah, but we’re normally within that 35 to 45, you know, category I want to say. You know, 35 to 50.
Brad: 30 minutes is tough. I’ve tried to do shows since and we, again same thing, try to get it in 30, and it’s just really hard to do. Like, you have to get in the show immediately and have a really strict schedule with topics. As soon as you hit that five or ten- minute mark, you have to move on, regardless of how awesome the conversation is. You just have to move on if you’re going to hit that mark. It’s really hard to do.
Louis: Yeah, especially with a big panel show like this, because everyone wants to contribute something to every, you, every conversation. You know, with one on one interview shows there have been a few that have been more around that length. I think some of them are under half an hour.
Kevin Yank: I think you’re absolutely right. When you’re planning a show, you kind of think of what you have to say about it, and you go “I could probably talk for 30 minutes about that. I’m pretty interested in that topic. I’ve got 30 minutes of stuff to say, and sure, there will be other people saying some stuff too, but they’ll probably say some of the stuff that I’m thinking of. So, I won’t say that stuff, and I’ll even out to about 30 minutes.” When in reality, every person is bringing 30 minutes plus to the table, and we always have to say less than we would like.
Brad: Got to get that last word in four times.
Kevin Yank: Yeah.
Patrick: Like you guys are doing going back and forth? No, I’m just kidding.
Brad: Crickets.
Kevin Yank: So, what comes next?
Patrick: Geez, Kevin. Calm down.
Kevin Yank: I’m so excited.
Patrick: Stop pushing me along. You’re a guest, okay. You’re a guest.
Kevin Yank: I’m sorry.
Patrick: I’m just kidding. Okay. So, another thing I wanted to talk about is our live show, because we did some live show, and we did four of them. Three of them were in person. One was not, and the first live show we did was May 22, 2010, and we did a live show at WordCamp Raleigh, in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was me, Brad, and Stephan, and then we came back again a year later, and the cops were there to get me. They heard about the last podcast. Run, Okay.
Yeah, and then we came back a year later, May 21, 2011, and did a live show at WordCamp Raleigh again, same lineup. We had a really cool setup on stage with like arm chairs and stuff, and it was really a very talk show-esque. I just want to talk about that, because that was fun, especially the first one was kind of unique, and we had a really great lineup of people to talk to. Stephan, do you have any kind of memories of that?
Stephan: Yeah. You know, it was a lot of fun. Like, at the time, it made me very nervous. I, I’m not a get up in front of people type person, so getting up there and doing a live show made me a little uncomfortable, but you guys, you guys were troopers. I think both of, both you and Brad had public speaking experience, so it made me a little more at ease, and I think I’ve gotten a little better now, but it was, it was fun. I think, I think, the, the audience actually, they kind of got into it and they were asking questions and we got to meet some people and it was fun. I really enjoyed it.
Brad: Yeah, I, I had a lot of fun with that. The first one was definitely, I was definitely a little more nervous on the first one because it’s, I think the show was, what, two hours?
Patrick: Yeah, we did about a two-hour show.
Brad: Yeah, a two hour show, and so I’m like, initially, a little nervous just thinking “All right, we have two hours we’re going to be up here and we have to make sure we are doing something the whole time, right, for two hours”.
Patrick: Juggling, talking, whatever, as long as we have something.
Brad: Yeah, showing off our talents, you know, whatever it may be. But once we got going and we had such a, a strict kind of schedule of guests, when they were coming on, when they were coming off, we had a lot of helpers from the audio-video side. We also had, I believe we had someone set up that was going to kind of round up who was coming up next and make sure they were ready to go. So it was like, that took a lot of the stress off because you know “All right, every 10 minutes they’ll be someone new sitting here” and that makes it easy, and then the time really flew by.
As soon as we started we were over, so I thought it was a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun with it. The first one I think is probably the most memorable for me just because it was the first time I’d done something like that, but the other two that we did were, were great, and I especially liked the BlogWorld one just because it was the first time the four of us had ever been together.
Kevin Yank: Yeah. Oh I was, I was devastated to have missed those WordCamp ones originally, just listening to them after the fact I was thinking “Oh, it would have been amazing if all four of us were there”.
Patrick: Yeah, we got that opportunity at BlogWorld Expo. That was October 15th, 2010, and all four of us, that’s the first time and only time that the entire current host line up at any time has got together face to face and recorded a show and that was a lot of fun. I mean, I have a lot of memories of that trip and, you know, one of the ones, just go, I mean, we went, the night we all got there, we went to the buffet at Mandalay Bay and, like, it’s like 10 SitePoint people and then me, Brad and Stephan, we all just had fun getting to know each other. It was really cool to meet everyone, to meet you and Shane and, and Luke Cuthbertson who was the CEO of SitePoint at the time and the other people. It was a really great conference.
Kevin Yank: It was a great opportunity. SitePoint was there to, to launch the Learnable site at the time and we-
Patrick: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Yank: Were there meeting bloggers and finding bloggers who would be interested in recording courses for the site and, yeah, it was just, I suppose, fate that we were all ending up going to that event and not only that but they had a dedicated podcast area that as far as I can tell no one used except us. Is that right?
Patrick: Yeah, and it’s funny you mention that. I, I don’t know, and it’s funny you mention that because one of the funniest thing I can remember about that whole thing is that, you know, I don’t mind saying this, but BlogWorld, you know, dropped the ball, right? I mean, they, they fumbled it and they kicked the ball behind the fridge. I mean, literally, like, we, we did, we did not know we were going to be recording until, like, a, a few days before, and I had hooked them up with SitePoint, you know, you guys, I know you guys, not you guys, but SitePoint organization, Learnable, etc., spent a lot of money to be there, and also gave money to the conference and we were just going to do this podcast.
That was the start of it and they promised us this area and then bad communication. And I remember you emailed me, like, I don’t know, 10 days, 8 day before and said “Guys, I don’t know. I don’t know if we have a show”.
Kevin Yank: I’m pulling the plug.
Patrick: And I sent them and email and something that, yeah, and I sent them an email. It was a funny thing you told me, you said the email I sent them which was kind of pointed, you printed out and put it on the wall and everyone in the office laughed at it. Because I, I was the bad guy I guess because I had to say “Hey, stop asking about this, just get our podcast stuff together,” and it worked out.
Kevin Yank: I think they put it out there that they would have a podcast facility and probably the only people they heard from who were interested in using it was us. I know the Twit Network did some broadcasting from the show, but they had their own gear and their own set up. They were roaming around the, the place and talking to people on the show floor. We were the, the users of the podcast place and I, I guess, I don’t know, it felt like it stalled at the point of trying to schedule the times that we would use the thing, but the place was vacant the rest of the time.
I have to say the, the guy, I wish I could remember his name, but the guy, the technician who was there on the day to help us with the recording, I wasn’t expecting anyone. I thought we were going to walk up and there would just be, you know, some chairs in an empty space, and we’d, if there were microphones we would be lucky, but there was a guy there. He had microphones, he had professional recording gear. He knew exactly what he was doing and he took really good care of us, and he even dealt with it when we wanted to plug in our laptop to UStream so that we could stream the recording live as we were doing it.
Brad: Yeah, I mean, at the end it came out great. Like the, the quality was awesome.
Patrick: Yeah.
Brad: You could kind of hear a little bit of the background which I thought was cool, but it wasn’t like, overpowering at all. And then, yeah, we had the live stream going on, so at the end of the day I think it came out really great.
Kevin Yank: Absolutely.
Patrick: So yeah, that was a lot of fun. And then our third live show of the four was February 13th, 2011, when did our live 100th episode and we did that over video. I think we used TinyChat to have a little chat element and that was kind of the first time, and I don’t want to say we tried it the next week or two weeks from then, and then we kind of didn’t do it anymore, but we had kind of that chat experience and video and that kind of brought a different element to it.
Kevin Yank: I have to say, in hindsight, I really enjoyed that process and, I, I’m not sure why we didn’t keep doing it. I think it might have just been one more element that we had to set up or plan when we were recording a show and it was maybe just a little too much work, but when we were doing it, it, it seemed great.
Patrick: Yeah. I think it was because you and Brad, you and Brad didn’t want to have to comb your hair.
Kevin Yank: Yes. My lengthy locks.
Brad: You mean put pants on, right?
Stephan: I actually liked the video shows. I thought it was kind of cool that we had, like, a video going. I was uncomfortable at first and I, I just think we had some technical difficulties with it. We could never get it to, to do it right. We would have the audio recording, and we could never get the video to show up in synch or, or we could get it to show up sometimes and I think we just kind of said “Eh, forget it. We’re just going to, we’re just going to go with the audio because that’s what we’re comfortable with.” That’s what I remember of it.
Kevin Yank: Yes, but the surprise for today is that the reason the SitePoint podcast is ending is because we have figured it out and the, the podcast is ending and the video podcast starts next week right guys?
Patrick: Yeah. Show me, tell me where to sign up.
Kevin Yank: It’s a whole new cast I’m afraid. We have nothing to do with it.
Patrick: Yeah, I mean, so I think part of this, what we’re talking about is the diversity of the show, right? I mean, we did group news shows. We did group shows. We did shows with guest hosts. We did group interviews where we, were more of us, more than one of us was on to interview someone. We did solo interviews. We did live shows, live shows with video, live shows in person, two, three, four host set ups, so really, we, you know, we tried most every kind of format.
Kevin Yank: Yeah, and for a while, at the beginning, for the first year or so it was an every two weeks show, it was a bi-weekly show.
Patrick: Right.
Kevin Yank: And then I remember distinctly a conversation I had at a Web Standards group meeting Melbourne one night, I think I had spoken it early on the night, and someone came up to me and bought me a drink afterwards and he said “Listen, I’m a big fan of the SitePoint podcast” and it was probably the first time I had met someone in person who, who was a listen to the show and he said “Do it more often. Two weeks is too long to wait” and I kind of thought “Maybe this is our only rabid fan who wants twice as much SitePoint podcast, but maybe there are people out there who would listen to it every week.”
And I know a lot of the really popular shows that have broken through and have built really huge audiences over the years, they do that through consistency and having a particular day of the week that it comes out and it always comes out on that day of the week and, and you can count on making that show part of your week as a listener and I thought, “You know, there’s something to that and maybe if there’s a way that we could take the show weekly, we should.” And I think that’s when we hatched the idea to do an interview every second show.
Patrick: Yeah.
Kevin Yank: And that’s something you continued right through till today, right?
Brad: So that idea all came from someone buying you a drink, huh?
Kevin Yank: Yes. I wish, once again, I can’t remember his name.
Patrick: Yes. Just had to grease the wheel.
Brad: Yeah, I actually, the interviews were fun. I didn’t do nearly as many as you Kevin. I did a few though, and they were definitely memorable. It’s the first time I ever Matt Mullenweg as actually the first interview I’ve ever done, one-on-one interview I’d ever done in my whole life like that, so that was a little bit nerve-wracking, especially since I was, you know, really just getting into the WordPress community and he’s kind of the, the godfather of it all, you know, so that didn’t help either, but, you know, overall I learned a lot from doing it and I, I really enjoyed it, so I did a few others over the years.
That’s definitely a lot harder than it sounds, a one-on-one interview because, well, you guys know, I think we’ve all done one here, but to listeners, maybe not, that, you know, you kind of have to, you don’t know what the, the interviewee is going to kind of toss back at you. Some people could chat all day long about, with one question.
Other people might give you a five-word answer and that’s it, and so it’s like you have to kind of be prepared to roll with that and also have questions lined up and if there’s something else, you know, kind of dive into the topics a little bit more, so it’s more of a challenge than a group panel where, especially interviewing somebody with multiple people because it’s all on you to kind of keep that, that flow going. So I distinctly remember that, when I was doing these interviews, how it was a lot more prep work doing those than it was the group shows for me.
Kevin Yank: Absolutely. I would say generally though, there are a lot more people who give a good interview than not, and I think a one-on- one interview is one of those unique situations where both people feel a lot of pressure to deliver. The interviewer wants to make this a great experience for the person who’s given of their time and they also want to ask good questions because if the interview’s no good, they’re going to blame themselves. They’re going to go, “Obviously I didn’t ask them anything they were interested in talking about.”
Whereas the interviewee also, even though, supposedly they are the star of this show and they are the celebrity that’s been invited on to talk about something that’s of mass interest. Nevertheless, usually those people feel a lot of pressure as well to deliver, to be interesting because this show is all about them. It’s not like a panel show where if you’re having an off day you can sort of sit in the background a bit and support whatever is going on. As an interviewee, it’s all about you. There’s no getting out of that spotlight and if the show is bad, there’s no one to blame except you as the interviewee. So most of our interviewees, I think, did a great job of taking on that responsibility and providing something entertaining and insightful and something new and original that they hadn’t said before elsewhere.
Louis: Yeah. I’d second that. I think we had, or at least for the interviews that I did that had a really amazing run, I think the ones that were more challenging were definitely a minority and for the most part, I had a great time with almost everyone I spoke to on the show.
Kevin Yank: Were you surprised by how easily people say yes when you ask them to an interview? I know I was always going I can’t ask that person, but hey, I’ve got their e-mail address, I might as well.
Louis: It actually, what happened to me, is that there were definitely people who I didn’t even consider asking for a long time or at least when I started on the show. And then what happened at some point was I was talking to two of the authors of SitePoint’s mobile web book, Max Wheeler and Myles Eftos, and we were just talking about a blog post that Jeremy Keith had written which sort of said, again paraphrasing, but sort of response web design is the only way to go, dedicated mobile and apps is kind of not as good approach. And we just sort of talked about it. They said, we sort feel it’s sort of dogmatic of way of thinking about this.
And then, after the show went out. Jeremy Keith posted in the comments of the show, something like, “Well, that’s not exactly what I was saying. Obviously, I’d love to come on the show any time to clear this up or talk about it with you.” And so that’s when I kind of had the revelation of whoa. Well, Jeremy Keith, he wrote the first JavaScript book that I read when I was starting to program, learned web development. So, for me that was like, this is crazy, and did that interview and it went super well because obviously Jeremy’s a really funny, engaging guy.
Kevin Yank: Yeah.
Louis: So, once I’d had him on the show, then I sort of felt like, look. If I’ve interviewed Jeremy Keith, then I think that kind of broke any inhibitions that I might have had about asking people to come on the show. And so from then on whenever I wanted to email someone, didn’t matter how much of a superstar I felt they were, I was just like, hey, yeah. Want to come on the show? And like you said, most, really the majority of the time, the answer was yes.
Kevin Yank: Plus, you could say do you want to come on my show that Jeremy Keith has been on? You know?
Louis: Well, then, you could say that. Yeah. It was definitely surprising to me how willing most people were to come on the show. You know people, some people, I found, were a little bit uncertain because they hadn’t done interviews before. Even people who did a lot of you know, public speaking and blogging and people who were really, really out there as far as making their opinions known when it came time to do like a one-on-one interview, there were a little uncertain about how to proceed and that was kind of surprising as well because you’d think that between doing an interview for a podcast that’s edited and that’s just a few questions and getting up in front of a conference and addressing five hundred people, the interview would be a far less daunting task but it seems like it is a different thing in some people’s minds.
Kevin Yank: Yeah. I’d have to agree with that.
Kevin Yank: And that’s a good time for any young budding podcasters out there is there is probably someone out there worth interviewing who owes you a favor or who would never say no to you for whatever reason. And get them on your first show and then from then on, that breaks the ice if you’re inviting someone on your show, they’ll go to your site and go, “What is this show that I’m being invited on? Hey. Jeremy Keith’s been on it. It can’t be that bad.”
Patrick: Right.
Louis: And another good tip. This is just the tip for anyone who wants to start a podcast about web design development. If you want a smooth interview to get you started, and you’re not sure if you’re going to be able to ask good follow up questions and if you’re going to be able to run an interview, get John Allsopp on your show because you basically have to say, “Hi John. Welcome to the show.” And then you get 45 minutes of content.
Kevin Yank: Plus he will always do an interview.
Louis: And he loves. He’s really helpful. I mean the last time I had him on, it was like a week before Web Direction South So, I can’t imagine. I e-mailed him and I was like look I realize that you’re obviously really busy, but there’s been some stuff that you’ve blogged about lately that I’d like to talk about.” And was like, “Yeah. Sure. 100%. No problem.” He’s a great guy.
Kevin Dees: I have to agree with you, Louis, on doing interviews. Even before I came on the SitePoint podcast, I remember having that same animosity, I guess anxiety, like about doing an interview with somebody and I just ended up asking one of the guys that was in town to do like basically one of the first interview shows for a podcast that I was doing at the time. His name was Benjamin Young.
And then eventually, I think Patrick, yeah, we interviewed you for that podcast and then kind of from there. I think Patrick was the first person that I had asked to do the interview because I had been listening to the SitePoint podcast from episode 2. I wish I had figured out about it since episode 1 but it could be. Okay. I was like an original fan but unfortunately, I missed that mark.
But, yeah. I sent Patrick an e-mail and Patrick was more than happy to come on. I think after getting to talk to you Patrick, it was kind of downhill from there as far as somebody I had not met before that I asked to do an interview on the show or actually, our concept was a little bit different because it wasn’t actually an interview. Jonas and I actually got to talk to you together. So, that was kind of an interesting thing.
Patrick: Yeah. It’s funny how it starts from there because like you know, you had interviewed me, and I had listened to your show a little bit and when Brad left, it was. And Louis, we’d been talking to Louis about maybe doing a little less interviews because interviews I talked about require a lot of preparation. A lot of time was in that.
After you’ve gotten to a certain point, you’ve interviewed so many people and it becomes harder to think of new people, so that was one of the things where I knew you did interviews and so I was like, I wonder if Kevin will do some of these interviews. And then we can invite him to be on the show as a host and so it worked out from there from us just talking and me being on your show and seeing that you’d interviewed a lot of well known web designers and had a good rapport with them.
Kevin Dees: Yeah. It was definitely really fun, kind of getting into the community. I haven’t been around quite as long as you guys have, but you know, just the enthusiasm that the community has and just the listeners as well, I mean even on the podcasts that we were doing at that time. We got to do and talk to one of the listeners on the show and then, moving into that, my own personal blog and able to talk to people doing video interviews.
And so all that stuff, you just become, I guess, more comfortable with it because you realize that every person that you talk to is just a person and they just happen to be doing something different than you are and that’s what makes it worthwhile to talk to that person. And I don’t. I found you think of somebody like a superstar and really they’re just like you. They’re just wanting to do something and so they’re more than happy to talk about it.
Kevin Yank: Absolutely.
Patrick: That’s funny. You know, I like your honesty because you said you’ve been listening since episode number 2 and a lot of people would just say, you know what that’s long enough. I can say from the beginning, but no. You specifically say episode number two. You have to love that honesty. But that brings up a point I want.
Kevin Yank: That would be the easy cheat. To go back and listen to episode one but.
Patrick: It would be and that bring up something that I wanted to ask and I think Louis’ done probably more interviews than anybody else if not right up there. So, I want, I was curious to ask you, what’s your favorite interview? And it doesn’t have to be one you did but obviously I expect one of the ones, some of the ones that you did to be one of your favorites. What are your like three or however many you come up with, favorite interviews, Louis?
Louis: I think I can answer that pretty quickly. I’m just going to quickly double check. So that first interview I did with Jeremy Keith was amazing. I had a really, really good time. Even listening to it now, I think it was funny. I think we raised a lot of interesting points that are relevant to designers and I think it was a great interview and it’s also been, at least from the stats I pulled from Libsyn before today’s show, it is, by a significant margin, our most downloaded episode. It seems that that is also the listeners’ opinion.
Patrick: Oh my God. It might be Jeremy Keith’s followers’ opinion on Twitter, but I don’t know about the listeners. I’m just giving you a hard time. Go ahead.
Louis: All right. All right. All right. Now, that’s legit. In fairness, you’re right. A lot of that was probably because he has a, sort of a podcast, web app called HuffDuffer and he probably shared it pretty extensively on that which probably contributes to that download count.
Patrick: I’m just giving you a hard time. You should be proud of that. It is our most listened to show far and away and it’s because of you and your interview.
Louis: That’s all right. It’s all right. No, it’s fine. You can give me a hard time. I can take it. And, yeah, so other ones I liked, we. I interviewed Ethan Marcott very shortly after he had just finished his involvement in the responsive redesign of the Boston Globe. So, I think that that was a great interview and that one, surprisingly when I was looking at the list was sort of down in the middle of the download numbers.
So, I imagine they’re probably people listening to this who haven’t heard it. And that’s pretty cool. It was fun to hear him talk about, you know, working on a project of that size and with the various teams that he worked with to try and get, you know…it was probably the first responsive design at that scale. It really needed to be really fast and effective at that size. So, it was an interesting conversation.
Kevin Yank: I’ve got a few memorable interviews that I’d like to jump in with.
Patrick: Yeah. How about I’ll throw it over to you next because I think it’s between you and Louis for number one and number two as far as who did the most interviews. Who are some of your favorites?
Kevin Yank: Some of my favorites? We had a lot of them on the episode 100 when we did the live one to thank them. We invited them back and top of that list for me would be Chris Wilson, who was always generous with his time. I did a live interview with him at a Web Directions conference once upon a time. We were in the little speaker’s lounge that no one used for anything except us doing these interviews, I think.
He was there as a speaker. He was there manning the Microsoft booth. Nevertheless, he gave me a good 15 to 20 minutes of his time to sit down and chat about his thoughts. Which at the time, no one would like to be the guy answering for Internet Explorer at that time and yet he was happy to give up his time and answer honestly and candidly. It was great to have him back on episode 100 once he had made the move to Google.
At that time he was on the Google TV team, but he has since moved back to browsers. His first love and he is working on Google Chrome these days. Probably my very favorite interview of all time is Derek Powazek, who I have had a long-time Internet crush on.
Louis: I love that show. I remember hearing that interview. That was a two-part show, right?
Kevin Yank: Yeah, we broke it into two parts because he had so much to talk about. It wasn’t even one of those artificial two parts, where we just edited it, after the fact. He literally spoke for a whole episodes worth during the first time slot that we had lined up. At the end of it we both agreed we’d love to chat more, so we scheduled a second recording after the first one to do a follow up episode.
Louis: I absolutely loved that episode, so that’s another one if anyone’s listening to this and hasn’t heard the talk. I think that’s not, you know, the content is definitely still timely and it’s absolutely worth the listen.
Kevin Yank: We spoke about online communities, which is something that I know you’re passionate about as well, Patrick. In hindsight, I would’ve loved for you two to have gotten in on that show as well. You’ve certainly had plenty of opportunities to talk about community in your time.
The other episode. The second episode. I forget which order they came in. We also spoke about publishing because he was involved in MagCloud at the time and he was also publishing his collections of short stories, the magazine called, “Fray”. These days he is running his own start up which is called, “Cute Fight,” and if you haven’t checked it out and you have a pet in your life or if you know of anyone who has a pet in their life, I recommend you check out Cute Fight. It’s just gone public. It’s a silly online game for owners of pets to decide once and for all whose pet is the cutest.
Louis: Fight to the Death.
Kevin Yank: Yeah, it is a fight to the death. You get to pick which gladiator stadium you’re fight takes place in. You pick three of the photos you’ve uploaded of your pet and they go at it and the community votes on which one is the cutest. It’s great fun and Derek continues to make great contributions to the web.
Other people that come to mind are Jeffrey Veen, who is at TypeKit these days, but his involvement in the web can be traced way back to the origins of Google Analytics and even before that. Alex Payne, who was on the Twitter API team and later at Bank Simple.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Alex does next. He recently wrote a great article in The Magazine which is an IOS only magazine publication which is published every two weeks. He posted a great article about how, “Being alone with technology.” He’s a guy that’s starting over a little bit. He’s left his position at Bank Simple and also ended a long term relationship in his life and it was really interesting reading his perspectives on that. I can’t wait to see what comes next for him. Those would be my top four just off the top of my head.
Patrick: Cool and just to draw on those a little bit, Chris Wilson interview was episode 11. The interview with Powazek and I actually did get in on that. I was…I interviewed him for the community stuff too, right alongside of there. He brought me on to do that, yeah, so episode number 48 was a publishing episode and 52 and 54, we released the community episode in two parts. It’s funny that you mentioned that because that is one of my favorite interviews on the SitePoint podcast. I think that was a really good show. I enjoyed talking about online community with him as he is a veteran of the space and I’ve been around the block a few times myself. We were about to have a really good conversation. I really enjoyed it.
So, my other favorite interview would be…
Kevin: I’ll just jump in and say if you want more Derek Powazek, he also presented a talk on running your own start up on Web Direction South this year and the video for that session is going to be posted online any day now. It was a great talk. He just sort of went, “Here are six situations in which I completely messed up in my career and here’s what I learned from them.” They were great no holds barred, looks back at personal failures in start-up business. Great war stories to hear as well.
Patrick: Cool. In addition to Powazek, Paul Boag was one of my favorite ones and also Amber Naslund and Jay Baer. The interview I did with them was really cool because Jay has been around the block on the Internet for a very long time and worked for the first company to offer shared hosting solutions, I believe it was. It was just a really interesting conversation. So, Kevin Dees, you’ve probably done third among us as far as interviews. Who are a couple of your favorite interviews?
Kevin Dees: Yeah. So, I’ve been on the show for about a year. I’ve been able to have a few interviews and I had to say among those, like you said, Paul Boag, I got to talk to him about his concept of client-centric web design instead of user-centric web design. I think that was a really cool interview to get to do with him because he had just released the book and he had just done his series on his podcast kind of talking about the topic. Just the idea that the company goals of the client that you’re working with kind of come above the user goals and all the things around that. How the business objective is. The business objective and as designers and developers, sometimes we can get caught up in the idea that it’s the user above and beyond. It isn’t to say that the customer experience and all that kind of thing isn’t important.
That was one of my favorite ones and then actually, the second favorite that I did was the one I got to do with Dave Rupert a few weeks ago. If you haven’t listened to that we got to talk about the Open Source projects that he’s been involved in like Fit Vids and Fit Text.
Just after that actually, I got to talk with my friend, Ronnie Taylor about Drupal. That one actually did fairly well on the stats for the SitePoint podcast. I don’t really know if we talked about Drupal much. That was a really fun conversation to kind of touch on something that was outside of Word Press. Sorry, Brad.
Patrick: Brad, is it safe to say that Mullenweg is your favorite?
Brad: Yeah, I think so, not just because of who he is, but also being my first one. I had learned a lot from it. So, absolutely. It’s been a while. That was three years ago. A Lot has changed in the Word Press world since that interview.
Patrick: Stephan, you have a favorite?
Stephan: Do I have a favorite? I really never interviewed many people. I’m not a good interviewer mostly because it was hard for me to do it every Monday.
Patrick: We totally understand that.
Kevin Dees: I’ll have to say Stephan did an interview at Word Camp Raleigh 2011. You got to interview me.
Stephan: That’s right.
Patrick: Very good.
Stephan: I don’t know if that was more of an interview or more or less me letting you express yourself. I wouldn’t call it really me interviewing you.
Patrick: That’s what the greatest interviews are. Letting them express themselves.
Brad: It sounds like that really left an impression on Stephan. He remembered that.
Kevin Dees: He said no more, no more.
Louis: I actually just thought of another one that I really enjoyed. I thought I’d just throw one into the list. An interview I did for podcast 139 with Lea Verou. It was just a great interview. I feel like I got the impressions talking to her by email when I asked her to come onto the show and even when we hooked up the Skype call that she was a little bit anxious about being on an interview and she didn’t really know…we didn’t really have a clear topic to talk about. I was just going to ask her about all the different various projects that she had done and her talks at conferences that I’d seen videos of.
That kind of interview where you don’t have a core topic and you’re not asking someone about something they feel really opinionated about can be really challenging for everybody, but this one went really well. It was just a lot of fun to do. Lea, is obviously an amazing developer, if you’ve seen any of her work on CSS3 and Javascript. She’s pretty crazy. So yeah, that was a lot of fun as well.
Patrick: You know, one of the things I thought would be fun to look at, I actually did do this research is to, you know, line up kind of the first and last episode of each host and when they debuted. So I’ll just quickly run through that and then we can kind of talk about if there’s anything to talk about, and if there’s something in the middle that I think we’ll talk about, but, the pilot episode, October 15th, 2008, that was the first episode for Brad, Me and Stephan. Episode number one, November 10th, 2008, was the first episode for Kevin Yank. Louis joined us on episode number 101, that’s March 3rd, 2011, but Louis has been on the show before. That was his first one as a host, interviewing someone, or as a host otherwise, but he was actually on the show as a guest before that on an episode that was called “The Occasional Dick Move with Louis Simoneau “.
Kevin Yank: That’s when I interviewed you, Louis.
Louis: Yeah.
Patrick: Yes. Yeah, and that’s a good title.
Kevin Yank: Yep.
Louis: I had a lot of fun on that episode and, and I think it kind of gave me a taste for it, so, when, when Kevin decided when he wanted to move on from the show and asked me if I wanted to, to hop on, I think having done that I felt really, really excited about the possibility.
Kevin Yank: Muahahaha! My plan all along.
Patrick: You were trapped. Kevin and his charm, trapping hosts since 2011.
Louis: It was pretty cool, because, because for some, for some time after that show a Google search for my name turned up that as the first result, which I thought was pretty awesome, and I kind of wished it had stayed that way, but unfortunately all good things must come to an end.
Patrick: Yeah. And so, let’s see, episode 108, April 16th, 2011, that was Kevin Yank’s last episode, so from 1 to 108. Episode 138, November 11, 2011, that was the last episode for Brad, so he went from October 15th, 2008, to November 11, 2011, and what was, or I should say pilot to 138, but what was memorable about that for me is I actually recorded it with him in person in his office in his house in Pennsylvania.
Kevin Yank: It was a last ditch attempt to make it as convenient as possible for you to be on the show, but it didn’t work.
Brad: Yeah, there were, there were tears, there was hugging. It was emotional, but I actually forgot you were here, Patrick. I’m glad you, I’m glad you brought that up. I forgot that’s the one. I knew you were here for one of them. I forgot that was my last one. I probably should have remembered that, but that was fun.
Patrick: Yeah, I hopped on the iFroggy private jet when I heard you were thinking of leaving and, you know, flew, I had them drop me out of the plane, no time for a landing, parachuted directly onto your roof and jumped down and saw if I could convince you and I couldn’t.
Brad: Valiant effort.
Patrick: There’s nothing, there’s nothing to say to that because it’s all made up, but, you know, and that was a fun episode. I mean, it was fun even though it was the last one. And you have no memories of that so you’re not saying anything.
Brad: I remember the last show. I just forgot that you were in your house during the last show.
Patrick: Apparently it meant nothing to you. I was sneaking behind you. And, of course, right after that, Devin Dees came on, episode 140, November 30th, 2011, that was his first show, and finally, episode 192 is going to be our last show for Kevin Dees, Louis, me, and Stephan. So that’s the host timeline.
Brad: You know I see that you actually had Kevin back on again on episode 161, but if you look at the time line, you know, you never had me back on again so, I don’t, I don’t know what that says, but you bring me back at the, when it’s over.
Patrick: You’re back on now.
Brad: I’m kidding.
Patrick: But to be fair, we did interview you on the show while you were still a host. We had you on as a guest with the co-authors of your first book to interview you about your book, so there’s always that.
Kevin Yank: That’s a great point.
Patrick: Yes. That is a great point. Thank you, thank you Kevin. I appreciate that. And I, and in doing this research I actually tallied up how many shows each of us hosted.
Brad: This’ll be a fun stat.
Kevin: Drum roll please.
Patrick: And those numbers are as follows. Yes, drum roll. Okay. I hosted 124 episodes of the SitePoint podcast. Stephan hosted 99. And this includes the final one here also, if that was not clear, 124 for me, 99 for Stephan. Brad and Kevin actually came out tied at 84.
Brad: Oh!
Patrick: You guys, if one of you had just hosted one more.
Brad: I’ll share it. We can share.
Patrick: Or one less.
Kevin Yank: Yeah.
Patrick: You’ll have to share it. Louis Simoneau hosted 68, Kevin Dees, 31, and also, I realized this as I went through, Matthew McGain and Shane Tilley each were allowed to host one episode to do an interview with someone.
Kevin Yank: Never again.
Patrick: You know, it was, it was permitted once each in a pinch.
Kevin Yank: Just, by the way, for any Matthew McGain fans out there, I have it on good authority that he has a podcast planned.
Brad: Nice.
Kevin Yank: Watch iTunes for that one.
Brad: So Patrick, you won, by quite a bit.
Patrick: I am the winner. The biggest, I am the biggest loser of them all. Yeah, I don’t, you know, Stephan, when I was looking through the numbers on Stephan I realized that he didn’t miss an episode for, like, six months on the first run. Like, every time his name was in the, he was on every episode for, like, I don’t know, three to six months, and all of us has skipped at least one, but you know, he was the early iron horse.
Okay. So I don’t think you guys, I don’t know if I mentioned this to you or not, so I’m not sure if you had time to prepare for it, but maybe there’s something off the top of your head, I thought it might be fun to talk about favorite show titles, and obviously number 97, “The Occasional Dick Move with Louis Simoneau” is probably the leader and probably the winner in everyone’s mind, And, you know, it’s funny you mentioned that about the ranking because I actually checked that Louis and it, it still ranks for your name as I want to say fourth, so whenever someone Googles Louis Simoneau they see “The Occasional Dick Move with Louis.” Oh, it’s five for me, sorry, it’s fifth, six, sixth without personalized search. Thank you Google. Sixth. Sixth place, but still very high.
Louis: Oh. Facebook has changed it’s, oh, that’s, that’s annoying.
Stephan: We’re not here to talk news.
Louis: Oh, have you seen this? Facebook, when you have a public profile on Facebook it now shows, like, your, the city you live in, the company you work for and the university you went through in, like, the title of the thing, as if that’s like . . .
Kevin Yank: That’s what defines you.
Louis: You know, I mean, like what? I’m looking at this . . .
Kevin Yank: That’s who you are.
Louis: And I’m feeling all right. Flippa, Fitzroy I can kind of deal with that, like if that’s, and then McGill University, and I’m kind of like “Oh, come on. Come on.”
Patrick: Yeah I see that. That’s funny.
Louis: It was a long time ago. It cost a lot of money. I don’t really care anymore.
Patrick: It’s a little better than “The Occasional Dick Move with Louis”.
Louis: No, it’s not. I would actually prefer that rank higher. Oh well.
Kevin Yank: I want to bring it back to that title. I want to make clear that that title is, it’s not “The Occasional Dick Move” with Louis Simoneau. The actual title has “with Louis Simoneau” in it. So it is, it is completely clear that if anyone was responsible for the dick move in this context.
Louis: It’s the What Working Group. Oh and, that’s another funny one. This one guy has to, who publishes a fishing guide also called Louis Simoneau, so if you look at the bottom of the page there’s four pictures of me and one picture of some random guy holding up a giant fish.
Patrick: You’re in a lot, you’re in a lot of things, Louis. I mean, you’ve got Occasional Dick Moves, you’ve got web development, you’ve got the man, was that, was that the mandolin you said you learned to play?
Louis: Yeah.
Patrick: Is that what that was? And you’ve got hip hop and you’ve got, there’s just so much to your personality. You’re very diverse.
Louis: Oh. And that’s just, that’s just, that’s just the stuff I put on the Internet.
Patrick: And, you know, another title that stood out to me was number 45, “The One without Kevin” and, you know, I always thought that was funny, but then I looked into it also, and what makes it even more funny is we had already done an episode without him.
Kevin Yank: I wasn’t there to correct you.
Patrick: Exactly. No, you weren’t there to correct me.
Louis: I like number 47 “Checkmate Apple”. I think that, I actually remember, that was probably one of the funnier lines, I think it was you that said it, Stephan in, in the entire run that I was on. I’m going to have to go back and listen to it because I just remember it was a really funny episode when you said “Checkmate Apple”, I think I lost it. So that one stood out to me.
Stephan: I can’t even remember the context it was in.
Brad: I don’t remember it either, but it was really, really funny, at least to me. I remember, like, I probably laughed, I probably laughed the hardest after that than any podcast I’ve done. I’ve got to go back and listen to that episode now.
Louis: I think the one, I can’t remember if it was that show, “Solving More Problems than You Create” where, I mean, first of all, that line on its own was pretty funny because it was Kevin who just started going “I think this application is pretty good. It solves more problems than it creates”, but I think there, there was one show and it was around that time where unfortunately I failed to record the audio correctly, so the audio was terrible, but we were just cracking up the whole time, and I’m not sure if it was that show, but it was definitely in that, sort of a month or two ago.
Brad: I think it’s funny, if you start at the first page, the first few episodes they’re very, the titles are pretty serious, pretty spot-on, you know, very professional, and then as you get to, like, around 15 to 20 they start getting a little more silly, and just progressively get, like, a little more ridiculous over the different pages of time. Just, I think we were starting to realize there’s a lot of funny stuff coming out of these that we should be highlighting.
Kevin Yank: Probably my favorite episode title is “A Brain of Cats”, episode 38. That was, that was my description of the new AOL logo if anyone can remember. We, they, this was when they did that rebranding and the, the AOL logo’s going to be the words AOL, but the color that they filled it in with would just be a different picture every time they, a different photograph every time they used the logo and I think the, the examples they gave included one that, that reminded me of someone’s brain made of cats and I’ll have to go look that up because I can’t even remember what that would look like.
Patrick: And the other one that stood out to me was number 146, “Patrick Accidentally Installs Chrome”. The back story on that is that . . .
Kevin Yank: I have a new favorite.
Louis: That’s pretty good.
Patrick: Thank you, thank you. And the back story on that is that I didn’t install Chrome for a very, very long time and the reason that I finally installed it was, you know, when you install a software and it wants you to install something because it gets a referral fee, right. For you having that checkbox checked. I was hitting next, next, next, next. And boom, Chrome was installed on my machine. That’s how it ends is that I got tricked.
Louis: “The iPhone Snooty voice.”
Kevin Yank: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Patrick: Yeah.
Kevin: That was before Siri so I think the iPhone snooty voice has expanded in functionality since that episode.
Stephan: “I’m Here with the Booze.” Episode 53.
Kevin Yank: Sounds like those are our favorites.
Stephan: Thought that was pretty funny.
Patrick: Yeah, I think like Brad said, as we got on, we got more of a sense of humor the longer that we went.
Kevin Yank: Absolutely because Episode 1’s title was [The Economy] Can you think of a more boring start for a podcast?
Kevin Dees: You know maybe that’s why I didn’t listen to Episode 1. That might be why.
Patrick: Oh, the headline didn’t grab you. So we pulled up the stats that we had to kind of look at the most popular episodes. Overall trending the Internet were ranked the most popular. I went ahead and just kind of capped it off at a top 10 for both interviews and for group shows. I thought I’d just share this real quick.
As far as interviews go the most popular interviews Louis’s the King. All bow to King Louis the Third and his interviews and their prolific popularity. He mentioned Jeremy Keith. We talked about that. Number 111, for responsive web design, far and away the most popular show. Also the most popular interview, obviously. Number 2 is 159 PHP Master with Timothy Baronchek. Number 3 is 113 HTML5 and CSS 3 for the Real World with Alexis Goldstein and Estelle Wale.
Stephan: That’s a question that I had. How many of you guys listen to the shows? Do you guys often go back and listen to them?
Patrick: I’ve got to say I’ve never listened to a full episode of the SitePoint podcast. I’ve never listened to an episode of our podcast. I may have listened to a snippet or a place or just the beginning. But no, I don’t listen to them.
Kevin Yank: I always listen to every episode that …
Brad: Did you? I listened to, the first 30 or so. Once we really got rolling with it, I didn’t listen to everyone. If there were some funny parts or something I wanted to listen to, I would, but not the entire show.
Kevin Yank: I listen to every episode that I was on, and it’s because I’m paranoid I said something stupid or wrong. I had to go back and listen to it and make sure I got every word right.
Patrick: Is it like the Godfather behind the scenes, Kevin? You find out you said something stupid and you’re like, I come to you with a request. You have to fix this now and get it re-uploaded.
Louis: On this, the day of my daughter’s wedding. But yeah, when I started doing interviews, I would listen to those a couple of times over after I’d done them just to see points at which I felt like I was making a follow-up correctly or how I sounded. Then I stopped doing that once I felt I had it down. I did listen to the show before I was on it so I’ve definitely listened to the ones that, but once I started doing it I haven’t listened to the panel shows that I’ve been on because that seems like I’ve just had that conversation.
Stephan: Yeah, I haven’t listened. I’ve hardly ever listened to a couple of shows because I feel like I don’t like the sound of my voice, so I don’t know how people put up with me for 192 episodes. My hat is off to you listeners. [laughs]
Kevin Yank: You listeners deserve a reward.
Patrick: So we did the top 3 so I’ll just go through the rest of the list here. Number 4, number 127, CSS Tricks with Chris Coyer, number 5, 145, Backbone.js fundamentals with Adi Osmani.
Louis: Adi.
Patrick: Did I get that name, Louis? Adi Osmani.
Louis: Yeah.
Patrick: And those are all Louis’s there. The top 5 are all Louis. Right across the board. This is the first non-Louis entry, is number 78UXBosh-censored with Matt McGain and James Mansfield. That was Kevin Yank.
Kevin Yank: Wow, I made it in there.
Patrick: Yeah, you did. But then it’s right back to Louis. So don’t get too cocky. 143, Happy HTML 5 Holidays with Bruce Lawson. I have one actually, number 119 Online Community Roundtable with Matthew Howie, Sarah Hawk and Vanessa Paech, the online community show that we did. Number 153 Mobile 1st with Luke Wroblewski, that’s Louis again. Number 10, again Jeremy Keith, number 168 Secret Source with Jeremy Keith and that’s Louis. So Louis has 8 of the top 10 here and then myself and Kevin Yank.
Louis: And the crowd goes wild.
Patrick: I do. It’s total domination for Mr. Simoneau.
Kevin: It’s amazing work.
Patrick: That’s the interview shows. Let’s talk about group shows here. Number 1, the number 1 group show, most listened to number 130, “High on Responsive Design.”
Louis: I remember that and I remember where the title of that show came from. It was you dragging the Boston Globeset around and looking how the weather widget changed when it switched across the break point.
Patrick: Right. Change in design.
Louis: You said something like I’ve never taken drugs but I imagine this is what it’s like.
Patrick: It’s like so many colors, man. It’s like it’s moving, man. Yeah, that was Brad, Louis, me, and Stephan on that one. Number 2 was another great title. Here’s another one we didn’t mention. Number 171, Don’t Trust the Users.
Brad: You definitely should never trust the users.
Patrick: Don’t trust the users. That’s Kevin Dees, Louis and me. Number 3, 112 was Where are My Rounded Corners? Another funny title there. Brad, Louis, me and Stephan were on that one. Number 75, Awesome Overkill. That was the first kind of pre-Louis days one. Brad, Kevin Yank, me and Stephan. Number 5 was 118 www.www.
Louis: That was the stupidest show name. I can’t even believe I managed to say that on the intro. I think I did 12 takes of that intro.
Kevin Yank: Say it serious.
Patrick: But it’s genius in hindsight, it’s genius. Like I said, that was Brad, Louis and me. Number 6, No. 122. Important. No. It was me and Brad with special guest, Kevin Yank.
Kevin Yank: Um. Yeah.
Patrick: You were a guest on that one. Now, did you remember that it was memorable in any way or that it meant anything to you, but you were there. Number 7, 169 Web Intense. Kevin Dees, you’re the first one on there, Louis and me. Number 148, All Aboard the Facebook Train, Kevin Dees, Louis me and Stephan. Number 67 comes in at ninth place. That’s the earliest one on this list, and it’s the Browser Dance with Brad, Kevin Yank, me, and Stephan. Finally, number 10, 175 Typography. Kevin Dees, Louis, me, and Stephan.
Louis: That has actually been incorrectly titled.
Patrick: I know. I thought it was.
Louis: Yeah, what happened was we recorded the show and we were talking about Adobe releasing Source Sans which is an open source pond and they announced on type foundry blog which was Tyblography which I thought was a really silly name for a thing. I thought oh, you know, let’s title the episode Typodgraphy like a podcast instead of a blog. I said Typodgraphy in the intro, but then I emailed Karn the audio and everything, and I didn’t actually mention that the show was Typodgraphy. Obviously, it doesn’t really sound that different from Typography so that show ended up with a somewhat less entertaining title of Typography, rather than Typodgraphy. If you listen to the show, I definitely say Typodgraphy.
Kevin Yank: It’s in there. You can listen.
Louis: Yeah, It is in there.
Patrick: So those are the top 10 most popular interview and group shows. It’s a pretty good mix. From earlier shows and the later shows.
Kevin Yank: Absolutely.
Patrick: I did put together a couple of data points on the show in addition to the ones we discussed. Obviously, this gives me 193 total shows in total with the pilot. Total file size for all of our shows through 191, so not including this one, is 6.68 gigabytes.
Brad: Lot of talking.
Kevin Yank: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Brad: That’s a lot of audio.
Kevin Yank: Is that uncompressed or compressed?
Patrick: That is the dot MP3 files downloaded and hosted on my hard drive.
Kevin Yank: Wow, that’s compressed. That’s amazing, guys.
Louis: That’s a lot of audio.
Kevin Yank: That’s a lot of MP3.
Patrick: That’s a lot of space. And between that and my backup drive, it takes up 13 gigabytes of space. As far as the time the show has run it’s going to be four years, one month, four weeks and one day from the pilot. Four years, one month and four days from episode 1 so, either way, we’re over 4 years and a month of podcasting.
Brad: Definitely had a good run, for sure.
Patrick: All right. The .net Magazine award was a pretty cool moment when we won podcaster of the year. We beat out a lot of very good shows hosted by very popular people. Kevin Yank, you were there, with Karn, actually. Karn Broad came there. Set the scene. Talk about that moment of picking up the award.
Kevin Yank: Well, I can remember is it was at a dance club in Central London and I had come to town.
Patrick: And, you were, like, I have to stop dancing for a second.
Kevin Yank: What?
Patrick: You’re out there dancing like crazy. There’s an award going on also so, excuse me ladies, I’ve got to step over here and accept an award.
Kevin Yank: It was a dance club in Central London but you have never seen such a group of nerds in that dance club in your life. It was a small club. It was packed full of people. I would say a good number were there to find out whether they had won or not. What I remember fondly is that there were two podcast award categories. There was the best podcast and the best video podcast.
Patrick: Yup.
Kevin: And from memory, The Big Web Show on 5 by 5 won the best video podcast. That’s a great show with Jeffrey Zeldman. If listeners of this show are looking for something new to add to their playlist after this one ends, that’s a great choice. But I kind of, just quietly, no one has told me this is the case, but I got the distinct impression that they created the second category so that they could give the award to both of them because they thought we were both deserving. From memory, The Big Web Show had won the year before and they thought, “Well, we want to recognize someone new,” so they split the categories.
Patrick: We’re supposed to feel good about ourselves, Kevin. You’re telling us we didn’t actually deserve it and they created the category so they could give it to us as the runner up. Thanks, Kevin. Great contribution.
Kevin: I wasn’t going to say. I think they wanted to make sure Jeffrey Zeldman got his due as well. But that was the first night that I got to meet Karn Broad in person. You’re going to meet him in a moment, I believe. He’s one of the next guests on this show but he is one of the most charming and lovely people you could ever hope to meet. He was just a person on the other end of email messages to me up until that point. I had no idea what to expect but he’s a lovely guy. He puts his heart and soul into these shows just as much as any of the people behind the microphones. It was lovely to meet him in person. We spent most of the night hanging out together, meeting the stars of the London web scene.
It was a long way for me to travel from Australia all the way to London for this, but I thought when the opportunity came up, when the invitation came, I thought, “How many opportunities am I going to have to fly across to the other side of the world to potentially accept a podcasting award? That does not happen every day, no matter how great a podcast you have. So I thought, “I better get on that plane because that’s not one of those things I want to say I wish I had.” It was great to have someone there with me, someone else flying the flag. It would have been a big ask to get more than one host to fly all the way around the world to London to potentially accept an award, so it was great that we had a local in town, and I was not there alone.
The moment when we got called up on stage, it was interesting. These award shows, .net magazine is a great publication but often I think these award shows are run as kind of a fodder to write an article about later and so they were cranking us through. We were under direct instruction not to make a speech, “If you get called up, don’t make a speech.” I said, “What? I’ve come all this way.”
But sure enough, we got up, we waved to the crowd. They had a TV celebrity, a standup comedian of some kind. I can’t remember who it was but he said a few lovely things about our show. Then we receded back into the crowd to the rest of the night.
Speaking of people in the crowd, there was Jeremy Keith was there that night. Ian Lloyd, a SitePoint author from way back was there that night. Both of them can be the life of the party by themselves and together they were a force to be reckoned with for the rest of that night. Once the formalities were out of the way, the dancing stepped up, and I think the nerds came out of their shell a bit once the pressure of, “Did I win or didn’t I?” was behind us, and it was a great night from then on.
Patrick: Yeah, it was hosted at the London Ministry of Sound.
Kevin: That’s the one.
Patrick: And the comedian Jack Whitehall hosted the ceremony according to a report by TechRaider.com. Yeah, I mean, me and Stephan and Brad have never seen the award. It’s like a rounded block, right?
Kevin: Oh, well, here it is. That’s it. It’s on my desk now. It’s a cube. It’s a black, Lucite cube about 10 centimeters on each edge, black, glossy. On one side, on the front face, it’s got a chrome panel that’s got a corner cut off of it so that it kind of looks like a document icon and it says “.net magazine awards 2010 Winner Podcast of the Year – SitePoint Podcast” and it is sharp. It is heavy and the edges are sharp. I remember thinking twice about taking this through airport security because it could certainly be used as a deadly weapon if the need arose.
Patrick: Brad, Stephan, do you have anything to add onto that?
Stephan: I was kind of sad I missed it.
Brad: Yeah, I wish we could have made it but I’m glad someone was there. At least there was a representative with Kevin and Karn, so it was nice to have both of them there. I mean, it was exciting to win. I honestly didn’t think we would, but . . . I can say it now because we won, right? So I was like, “Aw, we’re never going to win. That’s cool.”
Kevin Yank: Exactly.
Brad: Yeah, I was really excited when we won. I never thought when we first started this that we . . . I didn’t even know there were awards out there for podcast, let alone the fact that we might win one. I just think it speaks to kind of the awesome show that we were doing and had all of us done since then so it’s a really nice achievement that I don’t think any of us will ever forget.
Kevin Yank: God bless .net magazine for creating a podcast award because no one else would.
Patrick: Yeah, and thank you everyone who voted for us because it was partially a public vote, community award, before going off to the judging panel so thank you very much for that. I guess we’ve reminisced a lot here. We’ve talked about a lot of different things. We’ve taken a pretty good trip down memory lane so I think one of the questions I’d like to ask us all, I guess, is sum the podcast up. What does it mean to you? What will you look back at it as? Brad, why don’t you get that started?
Brad: The best memory I have of the podcast is just it really being my first kind of podcast that was out there that had a good listener base, really the first thing anybody had ever listened to that I had done as far as podcasting. So that’ll probably always be my first memory. We had a great time doing it. It was a lot of fun and I grew a lot in the podcasting scene from it, from 130 or whenever it was that I stepped down.
It was a great run and all the relationships that we built up over the years, through the podcasts with you guys, our producers, guests we had on, everybody at SitePoint. It’s just neat to see where we were at the time, where we are now and it’s very similar to SitePoint’s forum.
If you go back to when I first joined in 2000, I knew nothing about coding and I still thank SitePoint to this day. The forums is where I really learned how to program, and the podcast, I think, is the same way, where I grew a lot just kind of work on doing development and things I think about just in the four years that we’ve been doing it, so those are probably the memories that I’ll take away from it.
Patrick: Kevin Yank?
Kevin Yank: Well, as someone who, as a little boy, spent his spare time locked up in his room with his bright red ghetto blaster with two tape decks in it recording songs from my favorite albums and intermixing them with me as a radio announcer introducing each of them, being able to produce a podcast and a podcast of the quality and enduring legacy of the SitePoint podcast is a really special achievement for me. I think I hold it right up there with the several hundred issues of the SitePoint Tech Times newsletter that we got to write as well at SitePoint.
I think it’s something I always wanted to do but I never thought would happen and I suppose I never thought I was good enough at this sort of stuff to do it on my own. I thought it would be kind of a uniquely conceited thing to go, “All right, I’m starting a podcast and people should listen to it.” So I want to thank you guys for getting that ball rolling and giving me no choice but to jump on board and be involved or miss out on what was for a long time a dream of mine and is now a realized dream. We don’t get to realize many of our dreams in our lives, and this is one that I did so thank you, guys.
Patrick: That’s awesome and, Brad, you know, you kicked us all into gear, right? Stephan and I were definitely not starting this show. Brad started at the red and said, “Hey, who wants to join in? And me and Stephan both said the same thing, “We will show up. We will talk. We will not edit this thing,” and then he got it going. So, Stephan, your thoughts.
Stephan: Well it’s kind of crazy. I used to do the same thing, Kevin, with tape decks and recording my voice over music and introducing the songs. I used to do that all the time, so it’s kind of funny.
Yeah, the podcast to me was kind of a way for me, I’m kind of one of these Internet geeks. I guess our listeners are kind of this way too. We don’t get out in front of people much and so the forums were kind of my way of communicating with people. I’ve always kind of been a loner and just a quiet guy and the podcast, for me, was a way to talk to fellow geeks and nerds and just friends.
As the time’s gone on, I think we’ve all become friends and getting to meet each other in person. We’ve built this relationship but we’ve come out of our shell, I think, of who we are, of being nerds and becoming kind of nerds with the ability to speak in public. So for me, it’s been a learning experience and it’s led to newer things and I really appreciate that. I’m glad to know all of you.
Patrick: Mr. Simoneau?
Louis: Hey, yeah. Got to say, I feel the same way. Getting to know you guys has been really the strongest thing for me. Getting the opportunity to make something with this much of an audience already. I think that although, at some point in my life I might start a podcast or a blog or something again, I don’t start with the access to the kind of audience that SitePoint had. That was amazing being able to get out, to make something that so many people listened to and enjoyed right from the get-go and to get know you guys and to have a really time.
I really enjoyed spending this time every week or every two weeks, just sort of talking about what’s happening with you guys. It’s always been really fun to do it and it never really felt like work or like I was doing hard work to put something together. I just felt like I was just having fun and I’m glad that so many people have enjoyed listening to it.
And also, the fact that I got to in the interview shows, talk to a lot of people who were sort of heroes of mine coming up when I started learning web design. You know, a lot of these people, you read a lot of their books and their blogs and you think, “Wow. That’s. These guys are amazing.” And then to get a chance to talk to them sort of on a one on one form and really go in depth, and produce great content at the same time. It’s been an amazing experience.
Patrick: Kevin Dees.
Kevin Dees: Yeah, I just want to echo whatever everybody else has said. Just getting to know you guys, becoming friends over time, just getting to meet, you know, Stephan and you, Patrick, in real life and also Brad at WordCamp. You know, just being able to talk to you in real life and become friends at that level and then just also just the community, really. If people didn’t listen to the show, it wouldn’t be much of a show. And so, just the fan base that we have and have had over time, getting to be a fan at one point, even. It’s just been really surreal, I guess.
Patrick: Yeah. I think you guys have really summed it up. I think. When I think of the SitePoint podcast, I think of a few different things. You know, the community of listeners that we have. You know, we have a lot of people listening to this show and supporting the show and it means a lot to all of us. Looking at the stats even, we’re looking at really peak time like in the population of the show. We haven’t hung on too long. We’re leaving at a moment when we have a really strong listener base and a strong group of people that support us and that always has meant a lot.
Also, I think we’ve all created something in this podcast that we can be proud of for years to come and I think we’ve put out a really strong show and something we’ve been proud of in the moment but as we go on into the future, we will continue to be proud of it and we will look back on it fondly.
And, for me, the show is. I get to come on and talk to friends of mine. You know, this comes through the show, I’m sure but we have a lot of fun. We laugh a lot. We joke a lot. We have outtakes or whatever where we are just laughing like crazy. I yell peace at me once and awhile and we all laugh and you know, it’s just a really fun show and you know these are not just my cohosts. They’re my friends.
So, I’m going to miss that. And of course, we’ll keep in contact in other ways, but for the last four years to be able to talk to the four of you every two weeks at least or sometimes every week, it’s a fun moment of my week and it’s been a great experience and a great run. So thank you all for that and thank you to everyone who’s supported the show.
Kevin Yank: I just had to run from the microphone because my Roomba started up. So, would everyone mind saying that all again?
Louis: You’ll have to listen to this show.
Patrick: Funny, Kevin. Funny. All right. Let’s, you know, dry our tears here a little bit and Brad, Kevin, because we’re going to let you guys go now. Where can people find you online, Brad?
Brad: Sure. I’m actually not online anywhere. So, this is it for me.
Kevin: You’ve quit the Internet.
Patrick: How do you manage that? How do you manage that with all your clients?
Brad: I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I have a blog. You can find me strangework.com. You can track me down on Twitter. @WilliamsBA and you can check out my company webdevsstudio.com.
Patrick: Kevin.
Kevin: I’m @sentience on Twitter. I’m Kevinyank.com if I ever do a podcast again or anything like, that’s where you’ll find out about it. These days I’m working at Avalanche Technology Group where we put out a couple of sites if you want to see the sort of stuff I’m working on these days.
We’ve got shouldIchangemypassword.com and if you’re in Australia, you should check out sendaslab.com which we just launched this week. You can send a slab of beer to your mate if you owe them for a favor they did. And that’s me.
Louis: I will provide a translation of that. You can send a case or a 24 pack of beer to a friend.
Kevin: The listeners are smart. They can figure it out.
Louis: Just got to provide a running translation, I feel like.
Patrick: Awesome, guys. Well, thank you for joining us.
Kevin: Thank you.
Brad: Thanks. Bye.
Patrick: So, on this episode, we discussed our producers over the years. Carl Longnecker who produced the show for a long time and Karn Broad has produced the show for a very long time as well and he’s our current producer and has been exclusively for quite a while. And you know, we’ve talked about how they play as important a role in this show as we do. You know, their work behind the scenes isn’t seen, and I don’t know if it’s recognized as much, but their time commitment to the show is great as our own. And it’s part of what’s made the show a quality production. It’s part of what’s made the show what it is, the SitePoint podcast. If it was just us trying to butcher and edit, trust me. I don’t know if we would have lasted this long or had this many people listen. Definitely not the second part. So, you know, we thought it was only fitting to have both of them on the air and join us and chat a little bit about their memories of the show and their time spent contributing to it. So, we’ve got Carl Longnecker and we’ve gone Karn Braun. Carl’s in the U.S. Karn’s in the U.K. Carl, welcome to the show.
Carl: Thank you very much for having me.
Patrick: Karn, welcome to the show.
Karn: Hey, good to speak again.
Patrick: It’s always a pleasure. So, this is the second pleasure. So, I guess always. Yeah, that applies. So, I want to talk to you guys about your time editing the show and you know, what that is like. I guess producing a podcast that gets a lot of downloads. Right? It’s been a pretty popular show. But you’re not on it, but you contribute to it and people don’t know it. And what that kind of feels like and how you feel about, you know, what you’ve contributed to the show. And, Carl, why don’t you start first?
Carl: I’ve always been the kind of in the background kind of guy. I like knowing that I’m involved with something, but not necessarily taking all the credit for it.
Patrick: Right.
Carl: And listening to the final product every week when it came down through my iPhone or my Android phone, I got quite a bit of pleasure out of that. I had a few friends that knew that I did it. You know, I started with the podcast partly because I was a very active member on the SitePoint forums, and I had over the years directed a few of my friends’ in the business to the forums, too.
Part of the reason why I ended up having to stop editing the podcasts and producing it was because I was, more or less, switched careers. I went more the in-house IT stuff as opposed to the web application development. But, I always enjoyed being involved with it because I knew it was a quality product and I always enjoyed the SitePoint community.
And you guys are always putting out very timely and very well thought out information about everything, you know, development related, and I always like to be involved with that even if I wasn’t the one with the voice on the recording.
Patrick: Awesome. Karn?
Karn: Well, my biggest career is as a sound engineer. It’s what I’ve done for years as well as doing web development. So, being, as Carl says, you get used to being the guy that nobody sees. I’ve done however many concerts, sat behind the desk and okay a few people will know who I am and what I do but I’m not somebody, even as a musician that’s ever courted being really “known”. I don’t want any of that.
I love doing sessions and you know, I’ll happily be hidden out of the way and just enjoy knowing that’s my work and knowing that people are enjoying it. I suppose it’s a different approach. Some people like to be out there and like to be stuck in the spotlight, but it’s not of a great deal of interest to me, but being involved in something, as Carl says, it actually gives you pleasure when you know the people are enjoying it too. That really works.
Audio, I suppose is like that. When you’re a sound engineer, you aren’t the person that people take a great deal of notice of really. But, you still have to be there and do your job and do it right.
Patrick: I’m trying to look back and find out how far back that you guys started and you have to forgive me because my memory forgets. The early episodes that were credited with the producer. I know that Carl’s show, the last one he did appears went away. I know you guys were alternating between one another up to that point and I think that Karn then took over full-time at 108. We’re now 192. So, that’s quite a long time. Do you remember the first show that you edited or when that was, Carl?
Carl: Oh, yeah. I edited the pilot back when we were discussing, you know, how could we make this happen. And you guys were looking for volunteers in the forums, and I had, I’d done audio editing and mixing previously, but only as an amateur back in high school and college. And, I knew that I had a skill set that could be helpful there and I always loved working with the community. I knew you guys had good stuff to put out there, so I wanted to be a part of that.
Patrick: And, Karn, how early did you come on? Do you remember?
Karn: I don’t. I remember there was, Carl was super busy or something, and they were worried about getting the podcast out. So, Kevin just shoved a Tweet out and Kevin Yank, that was, and sort of, you know, anyone sort of into doing this and I was a listener by then. I was somebody that fairly early on started listening to the SitePoint podcast. It wasn’t many episodes in. I was listening. And so, I just said, “Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, fire it over.” And then Carl and I apparently sent over edits at virtually identical times.
Carl: [laughs] I think that was the weekend that I edited it, and then pushed the upload button, and then left to go on a camping trip, and didn’t realize the upload only got a megabyte through, and then died. And so I came back from camping and realized that it hadn’t been uploaded, so I hurriedly pushed the upload button. By the time I realized Kevin had sent me an email saying, “Oh. We got someone who had edited it for us.”
Karn: Yeah.
Patrick: And it looks like, I mean, this is our mistake here, but I don’t think we started crediting the producer on the text of the podcast until episode 22, because that’s the first mention of Carl Longnecker that I could find. And the first mention of Karn Broad was episode 32. And so, at that point, it looks like it was pretty much alternated from then until 108, when Carl stepped away. Just to give a little timeline there.
From editing this show, obviously you guys hear everything. You hear stuff that doesn’t make the cut, a lot of it is just kind of joking around and laughing, and stuff that is just too sloppy to make it into the show. Do you have any funny memories of things that you cut out or that really made you laugh or that you remember from editing the show? Karn? What about you?
Karn: Oh, there are so many funny areas.
Kevin Dees: But honestly.
Karn: I typed a message to you a little bit earlier, Patrick, about the area of, “We don’t need no stinking badges’ episode,” which was 131, around that sort of time, and that was really funny. And there’s loads of laughter in that. But I know I edited bits out of even that, and there were several false starts, obviously, that got edited out for various comedic reasons. Usually, if one of the sort of staple bits goes badly wrong out of laughter, that sort of thing, it’s really funny, but you can’t leave it in as easily, and you have to sort of umm and ahh over about whether you can leave it in.
The previous episode was very, very funny. At the end, I even sort of edited things around a bit and just sort of thought, “I’m going to keep some of that in.” Both you and Louis sharing pace, and that sort of thing, I just have to try and edit a bit in. And Stephan, when he was trying to find out what was going on with the Skype had been done some strange beep noises, so I put those at the end at the fadeout.
Carl: There should be at least two, if not three, episodes, where the lucky listeners that decide to listen on past the end credits, I guess you can call it, Kevin’s sign-off, get some tasty bits there at the end. Oftentimes, I would have to cut a story out of a recording just because it was so long, or Kevin thought that it was very funny, but was too much of a sidetrack.
So what we would do is either on that episode or the next episode, put it on after the final sign-off. So there are at least two that I remember, and I think possibly three. So for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re going to have to go back through all of the episodes and find them now.
Kevin Dees: You’re not a true fan until you’ve . . . you’ve found all the hidden gems, all the Easter eggs.
Carl: Yeah.
Patrick: Yeah, I would say that I’m not aware of any of those, because I didn’t listen to the show. So I feel bad, but I would like to know what they are. So if anyone does know what they are, let me know. You guys bring up an interesting point about the things that you have to take out, because on some level, with some direction and guidance from us, you are in control, to a reasonable extent, over what makes the final show. And so you have to make decisions.
A lot of them are probably very easy. Patrick said a stupid joke again, that sort of thing. But I think a lot of them are more like, there’s a certain line that you had in mind for what would make a show and what wouldn’t make a show, and what was too much or not. And I was curious to hear your perspective on what that line meant, and that responsibility, and how you tried to guide yourself as you went through those decisions. Carl?
Carl: I guess, on a technical matter, especially at the beginning, I was cutting out a lot of ums and ahhs and that kind of fluff in there. But I do have to say, as time went on, pretty much all of you got much better on that, except Brad. I did a lot of editing on Brad, a lot of editing.
Patrick: Carl just hopped in a bus and rolled over Brad’s house.
Carl: But he made some really good points, so I spent a lot of time editing his audio to make it a point that could fit the audio quality that the podcast deserved. And I found that a lot of you guys, that sometimes when you were stumbling over your words was when you were making the most important points, and those were the hardest parts to edit, because I wanted to keep so much in there, but still make it intelligible. And I think most of the time I managed to do that. You guys kept giving me enough good stuff to make good bullet points.
Patrick: And Karn, you having edited the most episodes of anyone, what was your mindset on using the big red censor button?
Karn: Well, the trickiest person for me was always Louis. He restarts everything. He does a bit of a sentence and restarts it about four times. And then you actually think, “Well, to get a coherent sentence out of that, I’ve got to get rid of this bit and that bit and take two bits out from over there.” But when you edit them together, it sounds brilliant, and it’s really worth the effort.
And the interplay, particularly between you, Patrick, and Louis, always with Louis’s laughter and everything, often gave the right atmosphere in the later shows, and what really made it tick, as far as I was concerned, and getting those laughs and interplays right was what made the show a lot of fun for people to listen to. And it was getting that right.
And occasionally you’d have bits where we’d say, “We want to record that bit again because we shuffled it and we want to get it back in,” and those were the ones where you had to decide how on Earth you were going to make it sound like a coherent interview. I would imagine you were there, and if I was watching a TV program, would this sound like a coherent interview? Would it sound like people were having this sort of sharp conversation about everything and trying to make it flow as best as I could.
Louis’s reduced the ums, in the later time, but what he’s done is he’s replaced it with repeating pieces instead, and there’s not really any difference, so I’ve left him to it.
Patrick: So Brad and Louis, you guys, yeah. You guys got it.
Kevin Dees: Yeah. Man, I can’t stop. I’ve done very little audio editing, and I know that it is something that requires real talent. Balancing audio levels, making sure, just all of those little things that people… In the Web industry, I know, when I get to talk to somebody in tech, it’s so much fun, because there’s a level of appreciation that’s there for what you do, because they understand the complexity of it.
And I think the same goes for what you do in audio, and I’m sure that you can testify to this, when you get to talk to another audio guy… People just don’t, unless they are in it, have that real appreciation. And the little bit that I’ve had in the video world and the audio world gives me a real appreciation for what you guys do. So, thank you so much. Jeez, I know how much time and energy goes into that, to make it work.
Karn: Oh, thanks.
Patrick: Karn, do you use Adobe Edition?
Karn: I actually use the Apple stuff, start to finish. I start with Soundtrack Pro, and I clean the tracks up individually, before I then put all of the tracks into Logic and edit them together.
Carl: When I started doing this when it was just an idea being formed, I started off with Audacity. And it was good. I do have to say, it was really good at cleaning up Stephan’s horrible audio.
Patrick: Ouch.
Carl: But then Stephan did something, he got a better microphone, or a better computer, or something. But then Kevin Yank got me a copy of Adobe Edition, and I do have to say, that was an awesome improvement, in terms of sound quality, but also in terms of my editing workflow. It literally cut the amount of time that it takes me to assemble a podcast in half. So I have to give out some props to Adobe Edition there. And Kevin, for getting it for me.
Karn: When I first started, I was using a variety of… actually, I got Cubase and loads of different things, because I work in different studios and have to go with different packages depending on what’s in which studio and all the rest of it. But I have to admit that the speed with which I can edit all the time bits back together in Logic, because you can just drag thing over and that automatically crossfades, and things like that.
I loved doing the time, piecing it together in Logic, and I’ve never found a better noise reduction system so far than Soundtrack Pro. So I’ve always ended up using that, to be able to take out all the noise that comes from different people’s audio.
Patrick has one type of noise in the background that’s not great, but you can get rid of it completely, even when the speech is still there, and so on and so forth. I’ve found over the years that I used Soundtrack Pro, particularly. Occasionally, Louis manages to record his in 24-bit, although I’d swear in the last however many months, that the microphone quality that Louis’s had, I don’t know what’s happened.
I mean, Kevin Yank used to use Rode, and it sounded really nice. And Louis’s used to sound really nice for a while, and now it sounds like he’s got his hands cupped around his mouth like that. And I’ve got to try and eq it out. And sort of open his voice back out because it should sound quite open Louis’ voice, but it doesn’t with the wrong mic.
So I do end up treating the whole tracks, and getting your mic sounds quite bright, Patrick. So I try and take some of that cut out. Although your system, as well, tries to overload all the time. And that’s what makes your loud bits really jump out, actually due to the fact that your recordings overload quite a lot. They distort, and it’s trying to take that edge off, so that they don’t leap out so much. That’s always been the bigger challenge with your recordings. You’re a dynamic speaker, and that’s what makes you a great speaker to listen to, but your microphone and system are sometimes incapable of coping with it.
Patrick: Hey, I have to take it like everyone else has to take it here, so I’m totally cool with that. That’s… that’s funny.
Karn: You are a great speaker, Patrick. It really comes across whenever you did the live ones where you haven’t got time. It wasn’t so easy to edit things in and out, those live ones that WordPress Camps worked because you hosted. And I don’t think many people could have hosted those and made them work the same.
Patrick: Well, thank you, Karn, thank you, sir. I appreciate that. I love you very much too, thank you. I wonder, as Karn hears us speak, if he’s thinking in his head, ‘Well, there’s something I’ll have to edit. Well, there’s something I’ll have to edit. Well, there’s something I’ll have to edit.’ I wonder if he’s mentally processing what we’re doing right now and thinking of all the work that will have to be put in place to make it right.
Karn: I must admit, I tend to focus on what I’m doing at the time, I’ll worry about that later. I’ve got to speak and answer coherently. If I’m worried about what you’re doing in a technical sense, then I’m not going to reply in any way that’s going to make any sense to anybody. So, I’ve got to keep it on what I’m doing now.
You have to compartmentalize what you do a lot of the time. And again, that’s coming from doing sessions where when I’m playing guitar, I’ve just got to worry about the guitar, and completely ignore the engineering, so I don’t have to do it later. Other than, “Can I edit that?” If I think I’ve made a mistake, “Can I edit that from somewhere else? Yeah, I can, I’ll get away with that, that’s fine.”
But other than that, you have to focus on the little bit that you’re doing at the time, otherwise, I think, you end up not actually doing the job you’re intending to do properly at that point. So, yeah, I tend to have a very narrow focus. I suppose you could say I’m a detail person rather than a big picture person, very much.
Patrick: Good man. In other words, to sum that up, worry about yourself. Which is a good way to be. Worry about what you’re doing and make sure that it’s good. So, Karn, you went to the .net Magazine awards, which, to me, is one of the cooler things we’ve accomplished on this show, winning that award over some really great podcasts hosted by really well-known people.
And Kevin Yank flew over there from Australia to the UK to attend. At the Ministry of Sound in London, Kevin flew from Australia, and you are obviously in the UK already, so you made the trip, and met him and attended the ceremony. Can you tell us a little bit about that moment and your memory of it?
Karn: Yeah, it was a lot of fun, because you’re meeting a lot of different people there from different parts of the Web world, and it’s really surprising how many people-“Oh well, I’m here as the producer for the SitePoint podcast.” “Oh, I listen to that.” It was really surprising how many people actually really did respond positively. “Oh, yeah, we listen to that.” And have a really positive view of it. So that, I think, was what Kevin and I really took away and really enjoyed that evening. Meeting and spending time with people like Jeremy Keith, Jeffrey Zeldman. Oh, blimey, Jeffrey Zeldman, how many awards did that man win that night? It was about four of them, I think. The only one he didn’t win was the one we one, and that was about it.
Karn: He got freaking everything else.
Patrick: Yeah, we snuck out the back door with one.
Karn: Yeah, being with him was the man. And I’m trying to remember the name of the comedian who actually hosted the awards, where he was very funny. A lot less family-friendly than he is usually when we see him on the television. But yeah, he was very, very good.
Patrick: The name of the comedian was Jack Whitehall.
Karn: That’s right, indeed. He was great. Somebody that I do watch here on television and stuff, so somebody who is sort of familiar to me off the box, if you like. But yeah, nice to meet, a nice guy to chat to. It was a very positive community, it felt like a community, it felt like everybody there was part of a community, and Kevin’s a great guy to spend time with, and obviously knew quite a few of these people, having met them at various conferences and spoken. And obviously, he interviewed quite a few of them for the podcast as well.
Patrick: All right, so the last question I have for you guys, I’d like to ask you, and this is not an easy question, obviously. But to put the SitePoint podcast into terms, as far as what your memory of it will be, what it means to you, and reflect on your time spent producing this show. Carl, why don’t you go first?
Carl: When I started out doing the web development stuff, and I found SitePoint, it was a huge inspiration to me in learning the way that things should be done. And because I was at the beginning of my career, I didn’t have as much advice to give back. And when the opportunity for the SitePoint podcast came along, I said, “Okay, let me get in on the pilot of this, and see where it’s going.”
And then you guys came together and put together that first awesome pilot that was just explosive, and was an amazingly fun thing to edit, and amazing fun to listen to, and informative at the same time. I knew I just wanted to keep going for as long as I could because… I guess, kind of selfishly, I got to hear it before everybody else. But I had been learning so much from the whole community in getting my web development career going, and being able to give back with the podcast, because those were the skills that I had.
As opposed to being on the podcast, or being able to start giving back in the forums, I could be a bigger asset on the editing side. And I take pride in my work. So this was something that I felt like I could do well, and I think it went pretty well for quite a long time. So I enjoyed doing it, and I still enjoy listening to it.
Patrick: Awesome. Thanks, Carl. Karn. What does this podcast mean to you?
Karn: Well, obviously, it sort of feels like an association with you as a team. I love doing anything that’s team-related, I’m very much a team player, rather than somebody who has to sit on my own and try and be Mr. One Stop and do everything myself. I prefer to be in teams and I’ve always enjoyed it.
When I got the chance, I said, “Oh, yeah,” and I mean, my getting involved really was as a listener, initially, to the podcast. I wasn’t even somebody that was really involved in the SitePoint community, I was a listener to the podcast.
I use a few specific applications to do Web development, one of which I now do part of the software support for, and what have you, as well as doing hand coding sometimes. I use a program called RapidWeaver that helps me build sites at the drop of a hat, basically, and then I can hand code, tweak, mess around with things later. Having a mix of something that does a lot of the donkey work for you and then you can go in there, I always quite enjoyed that.
But I wanted to push out, learn more, and I enjoyed the SitePoint podcast, and wanted a shot to help out. I thought, “Well, what am I really good at? Okay, I make websites for people, and what have you, but what I really know is audio, and I’ve been a pro in that area for 20 years.” And being able to bring that to something that I also really enjoyed just seemed like a fantastic fit for me to be able to put those two things together.
As Carl said, when you’re a detail guy and somebody that sits in the background, you do end up taking real pride in those sort of things that you produce and getting all the little details right, and I suppose that audio is my thing. I’ve got a lot more things out there on iTunes that aren’t the SitePoint podcast, than I’ve got SitePoint podcast episodes.
As an audio engineer, I’ve probably on about 200 commercial released albums that are sat on iTunes? So it just seemed a natural fit to me to be doing something else that is in this area, but something that’s different in that it’s not something music- related. And just brought the whole thing together for me.
Again, if you’re involved in something like this, and somebody asks about, “What do you do on the Web?” It’s a great little bang drop as well, when people want to know whether you’ve actually spent any time really looking into this, do you have really any idea of what goes on the Web and what’s happening? It’s like “Well, I produce this every week, and I worry about all of these stories, and getting this link, that link.” We’re in this every week. Yeah. I’m quite up to date with what’s happening.
And it wasn’t why I did it initially, but it’s amusing to me that it’s proven to be something that you can drop into people when they’re asking you, “Why should I get you to build my website for this or that?” And that’s been quite an amusing thing I didn’t expect from it, to be honest with you. And then it sort of, suddenly, cropped up, “I do this.” “Oh, oh right. Who is SitePoint?” Well, they’re about the largest publisher of books to teach people how to build websites that you can find anywhere in the world.” “Oh, oh, right then.” So it’s a bit of surprise.
But, yeah, I will miss it. Trying to fit it in. I’m Mr Busy. I’ve always got another project and another project on the go. If I do 60 or 70 hours in a week, it’s not much of a shock. But, even so, I will miss it being around.
Patrick: Awesome. Guys, it’s been great to chat with you and before we go I just wanted to give you an opportunity to tell people where they can find you online. All right, Karn, so where can people find you online?
Karn: You can find me on twitter @webkarnage and I’ve got the website of webkarnage.net and you can often find me on various other forums or various different bits of software, but yeah, mainly those two places.
Patrick: Awesome. Well guys thank you again for coming on. It’s been great to chat with you and once again, thank you for all the work you’ve done on the show and all your contributions to make this SitePoint podcast the show that it was. We all really appreciate it.
Karn: Brilliant. Brilliant to be involved. Thank you.
Carl: Thank you for all the nostalgia it’s been a great experience.
Patrick: All right, so, two weeks ago we asked for listeners to send us their comments and to leave comments on the blog and even some on Twitter. We even got a bunch of feedback from listeners. They shared their thoughts on the podcast. What it’s meant to them and just their reflections on the history of the show and their time listening to it. So, we received a bunch of comments and we got them in front of us now and we’d like to read them here on the show. Let’s get started. Louis, why don’t you go first?
Louis: Right, this comment comes in from Tyler B. Says, “Sorry to hear the podcast end. This is the first web-related podcast I started listening to. I’ve started listening to. I’ve picked up a lot of new techniques, apps and news from the podcast. Thank you to the current panel and past panel members for everything.”
Thanks, Tyler. I really appreciate that. I can definitely understand the sentiment. When I started learning web design and development, one of the first places I went looking was iTunes and listening to Paul Boag and the BoagWorld podcast was really good to get a feel for how professionals discuss this stuff. And keep up with the news of the industry so thanks. Thanks a lot for listening all this time.
Patrick: This is from Michael Diaz from M10Digital.com. “What’s going on in the podcast world? About 50 percent of the podcasts I’m subscribed to have ended within this month. Google listen is shutting down. I dread commuting without your knowledge, news, jokes, awkward moments. Sad smiley face. Cut me off with some audibles or something. I can’t go cold turkey like that. Enjoyed the podcast very much. Thank you for all the information.”
Thank you Michael. Unfortunately, it does seem kind of cold turkey but I guess, there really is no way around that for when you stop something you’ve been doing for so long. Other than to put it out there in the blue and surprise people. But thank you for your support.
Kevin Dees: So, Bradley Allen says, “I’ve learned a lot and enjoy listening to many episodes of the Site Point podcast.” He says, “Take care, and thanks a bunch.” Thank you, Bradley, for listening to the show.
Patrick: And Bradley is @BradleySA on twitter. Over to you Stephan.
Stephan: Hope Stewart of HopeStewart.com.au says, “The Site Point podcast is finishing? No. Your show’s been an enjoyable source of industry news and trends as a freelance web designer. I will truly miss you guy. You’re not allowed to leave until you suggest some good substitute podcasts for me to listen to while I cook the evening meal. Boo hoo hoo.”
Well, Hope, thanks for the words. I think we could probably, throw in some suggestions for podcasts. I’ll try to throw some in the comments in the podcast. When we post this.
Louis: Yeah, there’s a bunch I listen to. I don’t listen to a lot of, unfortunately, web designer and development related podcasts. But for more general interest stuff. I got a couple of recommendations I can throw out.
Patrick: Go for it.
Louis: If what you’re looking for is random banter, I would highly recommend checking out, “The Bugle Podcast” which is I believe thebuglepodcast.com. Which is a show put on, among other people, by John Oliver. Who many people might know from The Daily Show and it’s basically just him and this other guy talking about news and current events. And basically, if you imagine the Site Point podcast at our least relevant, imagine something a million times less relevant than that, you would be on track to understanding what The Bugle is like.
You know, I listen to a bunch of shows from radio so, Planet Money from NPR is really good. Which is this short snippet. It’s about economics. But it’s about economics in a really interesting and accessible way. So, if people want to listen to that. I think that’s pretty cool. And obviously, I imagine everybody already listens to Radio Lab and This American Life. But, if you don’t then obviously, there’s those. But, that’s all I got. But, I hope that helps a little bit.
Kevin Dees: Yeah. I’ll throw in a few here.
Patrick: Stephan that was a great dramatic reading of the “No!” I have to say.
Louis: Yeah, I was really looking forward to that. I was looking at it on the page and thinking I wonder how dramatic this is going to be. And it was really good. [laughs]
Kevin Dees: Yeah. Let me throw in a few here that are web related. I do know of a few. So, you have, The Shop Talk Show with Chris Collier, you have The Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman, and then I believe there’s a new one from Unmatched Style called Like a Biz Talk or something like that. You can jump over there and that’s also web related.
Louis: This comment comes in from Corey Evans who’s at @UberCE on twitter. “Wow this iPod podcast is ending? That’s disappointing. I enjoyed the show a lot.” Thanks for the kind words Corey. I very much appreciate it, and I appreciate you making some time to listen to our idle banter over the past few years.
Patrick: The next comment we have is from Zach Lysobey. ZachLysobey.com. Lisobey is L-Y-S-O-B-E-Y. He says, “Wow, extremely bummed to hear you’re shutting it down. I’ve spent at least 100 hours of my life with you guys and I’m sad to say goodbye. I guess I’ll have to find you guys at a conference or something.”
Yeah, definitely Zach. I think all of us would love to meet you. If we are at the same conference or in the same location at some point. Thank you for your support of the show and for spending so much time with us. If you spent at least 100 hours, I mean, that means you’ve listened to most of our shows.
Kevin Dees: Okay. So, I have one from Nelson Menenes. And his website is fittopage.org. That’s F-I-T-T-O page.org and he says, “Really sorry to hear that your podcast is ending. Exclamation point.” I don’t know, I don’t want to yell into the microphone. “You have provided something that is really hard to find. A good overview of the technology as well as analysis on the wider industry. It wasn’t too technical or too generic. It will be hard to find a replacement. Thanks to all of the guys who worked on it.”
So, thank you Nelson. And, like you said, Patrick, Karn, and those doing the production, I think probably worked on it a little bit harder than all of us.
Louis: Yes. Definitely.
Stephan: I have a comment from Aaron Glenn @Aplus on twitter. “Bummed the podcast is ending. You guys did a great job for a long run. Thanks for the soundtrack to my commute.” Thanks for the comment, Aaron. We were glad that we could pass the time while you were in the car.
Louis: All right. I’ve got a comment here from Kian Ann who is @blogopreneur on Twitter. I am going to try and outdo Stephan’s dramatic reading.
Patrick: Do it justice. Do it Justice.
Louis: “No. That’s really sad I have 20 podcast subscriptions but that’s always the one I listen to first. Thanks you guys for all the amazing stuff you’ve put up over the years. Great work. I’ll miss you.”
Thanks a lot Ken. I really appreciate that. I know that personally if I’ve got a bunch of podcast subscriptions on the go and there’s always the one that as soon as I see been up there. It’s like, “Yes, I want to listen to that one right away,” And I never thought that our show would be that to anyone. So, it’s great to hear.
Patrick: I have a comment from Billy Cravens. Billycravens.com. “Too bad, for a developer, non designer, it was one of the few general purpose web dev podcasts I enjoyed. Thanks for all the hard work through the years.”
Thanks Billy. I think that’s a really interesting comment and a few people echoed that is that this Site Point podcast it wasn’t this super most technical, absolutely 100 percent, all the time technical podcast. It also wasn’t, 100 percent of the time, non- technical, soft, however you want to put that. It was a mix in the middle and it seemed like we hit that mix, so it’s awesome to hear you say that. Thanks again.
Kevin Dees: So, this one’s from Roger Spencelay. And he says he will miss the podcast. He learned a lot from it, “Nut hey, got to, find a positive in an ending. At least, I get half an hour of my week back.” Yeah. I think that is a rare positive things out of this for all of us is that we’re all going to probably get a couple of hours a week back and especially Kevin and Louis doing the interviews they maybe get a little more.
Stephan: Aaron Jackson. @AJackson on twitter 314 says, “Hate to hear that the Site Point podcast is ending. Great resource material. Guess I better download all the episodes.” I don’t think they are going to take them all off, Aaron, but if you want that backup locally then go ahead.
Louis: I’m pretty sure they will remain online for the foreseeable future.
Patrick: And like we discussed in the last show. If you happen to not see them in the future. I’ve got the hook ups. So just email me. I’ve got. I’ve got that vinyl, the 7-inch, the 12-inch, the 8- track. I can hook you up with all the episodes.
Louis: This comment comes in from Andrew Rugoff Resourceguruapp.com, “Really sad to hear the podcast is coming to an end. I’m subscribed to quite a few and Site Point was the one I looked forward to the most. I’m an optimist, and I am sure it will be back one day. In the meantime, it would be great if you could suggest some alternatives in your last show. Thanks guys.”
So hopefully, some of those alternatives, at least are new to you because there’s definitely some great stuff in there whether you’re looking for something more general or something web related I think we’ve suggested a few. Hopefully, if you say you subscribe to quite a few, you might already be subscribed to everything we’ve suggested. So, I hope there’s something in there for you.
Patrick: Next comment is from Daniel Davidson @DA_N. I’m going to do my best here, “Ending the podcast, WTF? One of my favs, you will be sorely missed. Good luck.” Thanks Daniel, we appreciate your support and the fact that you cared about us ending the podcast. Thanks for tuning in.
Kevin Dees: So Robin says, “I, too, am a little sad. I started listening to Boag World five years ago, great banter, moved on to you guys and The Big Web Show, more great banter, and recently I’ve been listening to Shop Talk. Anyway, to me, SitePoint had been the best balance of banter and useful information, so thank you so much and please don’t disappear completely. By the way, I listen while walking, normally on the way to work, in in-house, front end dev, but I will also go for an aimless walk just to hear a podcast,” so thanks Robin.
Patrick: Yeah, I think it’s really cool to hear how people listen to the show. That’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed from listening to these comments. Cooking, commuting, and walking.
Louis: So apparently, if we have the best balance of banter and useful information, does that mean the correct balance of banter and useful information is about, you know, 95% banter? Because I feel like that’s what we put out.
Patrick: We win.
Kevin Dees: Then what does everyone else do?
Louis: This is what I’m wondering. Maybe there’s just too much useful information in those other shows.
Stephan: From David Watson, “I will really miss your podcast, especially the off-topic host spotlights. I’m talking to you, Patrick. You had a really great format for a podcast, alternating between discussion and guests every other week, highlighting authors of SitePoint books could’ve only helped your book sales. It seemed like a great way to get loyal customers. I know I’ve bought a lot of books I never would have bought if not for the SitePoint podcast. Thanks Kevin Yank, Louis Simoneau, Stephan Segravess, Patrick O’Keefe, Brad Williams, Kevin Dees, Karn Broad, and everyone else involved in making your podcast over the years. Good luck in whatever’s next for all of you.” Thanks David. We appreciate it.
Louis: Thank you, David
Kevin Dees: Thanks David.
Louis: Next comment comes in from Phil Mervis. “Gentlemen, I’ve really enjoyed the podcast over the years. Engaging, entertaining, informative, and occasionally a little bit goofy as well.” I would’ve hoped for, sorry, this is me here, I would have hoped for a little bit more than occasionally goofy. I thought we were pretty consistently goofy, but look, opinions can differ on that.
It goes on to say, “I’ve learned a lot and I’m really appreciative. Congratulations to each of your for doing such a great job, as well as to Kevin and Brad for their past contributions. So long and thanks for all the fish.” Thanks, Phil, really appreciate it.
Patrick: I appreciate about that last comment, referring to us as gentlemen, so thank you for that.
Louis: Yeah, that was unnecessary, that.
Patrick: The next comment comes from Evalino Fernandez. “Hello, I’m a listener from Spain, I’m a Spaniard. I’m really sorry to hear that it’s the end of the podcast. I’m trying to improve my English, and one of the activities that I usually do for that is to listen to these podcasts, not just to learn, also because I love them. I learn a lot about what is going on in technology, and I have a lot of fun. I don’t know what the reasons are, but it is a big pity. Please consider to continue. Happy face. Thanks for all the moments.” Thank you Evalino, we appreciate the kind words and are happy the podcast has been helpful.
Louis: So we’ve got a, we also have an audio coming in from Matt McGain, who was one of the content directors, the creative directors at SitePoint at the time the podcast started and throughout probably the first few years of its life, so he sent us in a little audio comment, we’ll play that right now.
Matt: Hi, guys. It’s Matt McGain here from UX Mastery. I used to work at SitePoint. I was manager of online media, back in the day when the pilot episode was first recorded, and I can remember giving you guys a bit of a hard time about that pilot. I probably gave some harsh criticism, but wow, how far it’s come. To rack up 190 episodes, and to think of all the topics you guys have covered and all the big names you’ve interviewed, it really has been a remarkable achievement.
And while I’m sad to see it end, you should definitely all be very proud of what you achieved with the SitePoint podcast. So thanks for all the time you put into the podcast over the years. I know I’ve learned a lot from it, and I’ll miss it, but I’m sure you guys will go on to create other great things. Cheers.
Louis: Thanks, Matt. I really, really appreciate those words.
Patrick: Thanks, Matt. Thanks for your role in helping the podcast come along. You know, I think we all appreciate these kind of words.
Kevin Dees: Agreed.
Patrick: All right. Awesome. So, all right, so,
Kevin Dees: I think all of our listeners are great and I’m super pumped that they took the time to even leave feedback. I think it’s awesome.
Louis: Yeah, likewise. This show has, I mean, obviously this is true, whenever you yank something, but it feels like you need to acknowledge it, that if no one was listening, we wouldn’t have been making it, so it’s as much the listeners helping to make this the show it has been, as it has been from us. That was not a sentence, but you know, it’s all good.
Patrick: So before we sign off, you know, there were a few people that I wanted to thank, or that we wanted to thank. Obviously, listeners are paramount, everyone who has supported us over the years and downloaded the show. I mean, the show’s been downloaded many, many times by a lot of people, and I think having that audience, having the people that care about what we’re saying, as goofy or whatever, as technical or non- technical as it might be, as off-topic as the spotlights might be, I think that is part of the validation for us, that people care, and really was part of the motivation for us to continue doing it for this long. If no one cared, it would have stopped a long time ago.
I’d also like to thank SitePoint, I think, for giving us a platform. You know, I’ve been involved with SitePoint as a volunteer staff member for 11 and a half years or so, kind of a long time, and I’ve made a lot of friends and acquaintances, and people that I have a great relationship with, so I always have a level of appreciation, respect, and love for SitePoint. I really appreciate them for giving us the platform, and the ability to host this show.
Thank you to Shane Tilley and Matt McGain, two people who were at SitePoint and, you know, supported the show, and encouraged us to get it going way back in the day. They’ve since moved on to other companies and other roles, but you know, they had a role in that initial going and supporting of the podcast.
Also at SitePoint, Sarah Hawke from the Forums Hawke, the community manager at SitePoint. She’s always been really supportive of the show and helped facilitate it through the forms and the early going. So thank you, Sarah, for all of your support and kind words.
You know, the various administrations at SitePoint, various people that have been in charge or near the top over the years that have supported the show that I’ve had a relationship with, like Mark Harbottle, Matt Miscovitch, Luke Cuthbertson, and others, you know, thank for all your support.
Thank you to Mike Mella, who has done our theme music. I couldn’t let, I couldn’t leave you out, Mike, so thank you very much.
Thanks to Carl Longnecker and Karn Broad are the two people that produced the show over the years. I know you guys do a lot of work behind the scenes that makes us sound good and no one really knows about except when we say that the edit, and I don’t know if people understand the time that goes into editing a show that’s an hour long, but the time commitment that you make is as great as the one that we have made ourselves, so I think we all appreciate how good you make us sound. And you know, finally, for me, I mean thank you Brad Williams, Kevin Yank, Louis Simoneau, Stephan Segravess, Kevin Dees, thank you guys for, you know, hosting this show. Thank you for supporting me over the years, and you know, thank you for becoming good friends of mine.
Louis: Yeah, thank you Patrick. Thanks to all of you guys of course. I want to, you know, echo everything you said, you know. I came into this, and the one name you mention that I definitely did want to thank for support over the whole time that I’ve been doing the podcast is Sarah Hawke, who’s obviously been just amazing in working with the community, and on Twitter, and has really done good work to support the show on the SitePoint community at large. So thanks a lot.
Kevin Dees: Concurred.
Patrick: Stephan, you have anything to add?
Stephan: I just, you know, thanks to Karn and Carl and Kevin and Brad, thanks to everybody, really. I think, you know, we’ve created a quality show, and produced a quality show week after week, and I think that shows in our listenership and just that the following that we do have, and I think we have to thank the listeners as well for sticking it out for 192 episodes.
Patrick: Well, for the last time, maybe we end in little more extended fashion. Why don’t we go around the table and tell people where they can find us online. Kevin, why don’t you go first?
Kevin Dees: Yeah, sure thing, so you can find me, I’m Kevin Dees, at KevinDees.cc and @KevinDees on Twitter.
Patrick: I saw extended and that’s all you’ve got? It’s the same thing?
Louis: Well, we don’t all have, like, 17 websites.
Kevin Dees: Yeah, Patrick.
Patrick: Why not, why not?
Kevin Dees: So you can also find me on Dribble as Kevin Dees.
Patrick: Okay. Great addition, great addition. Louis?
Louis: Yeah. So, obviously, I am Louis Simoneau, you can find me on Twitter at @RSSAddict. I’m in a bunch of other places, but they all pretty much suck, so Twitter is the best place. I have a website I never update at LouisSimaneau.com and, you know, various other places, but really, Twitter. Twitter is the main place is to get in touch with me.
Patrick: And I am Patrick O’Keefe, of the iFroggy Network. I blog at ManagingCommunities.com. My personal site is PatrickOkeefe.com. I taste soda at SodaTasting.com, and I’m on Twitter at @iFroggy. I’m also on Facebook at /PatrickOkeefe and you can find me on Google Plus also. And my email is Patrick@iFroggy.com, so feel free to touch base with me on any of those methods. Stephan.
Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves. You can find me on Twitter @SSegraves. I guess I should spell that. It’s S-S-E-G-R-A-V-E-S. I’m sure people have looked at me, like, spelling Segraves with an A after the E at the beginning.
Patrick: Right.
Louis: Yeah, I actually did that. I wasn’t following you for, like, the first half of the time I was on the show, because I couldn’t find you on Twitter.
Stephan: So, I guess now, now that we’re at the end, I should spell it right. And I blog at BadIce.com, if you want to her me talk some more, I have another podcast, the PointsHoarder podcast, it’s about travel. That’s it for me.
All in sections: This has been the SitePoint Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Audio Transcription by SpeechPad.
Produced by Karn Broad.
Intro theme music by Mike Mella.
Outro music by Kevin Dees and Karn Broad.
Thanks for listening for all the episodes, and joining in with us over the years. Feel free to let us know how you feel or continue the reminiscing, using the comments field below.
Karn Broad
