PreviewCast

Ladies and Gentleman and PreviewCasters of all ages, I am excited to announce that after an outage of only 23 hours, PreviewCast.com is now back up, and live!

While you were all staring at a placeholder page of cranberry-picking heaven, the entire PreviewCast.com WordPress blog was uprooted and uninstalled, and a clean vanilla installation of WordPress was set up in its place. A few things got moved around in the PreviewCast feed during the outage, which may have messed your feed readers up a bit. Everything should be sorted out now. Our iTunes Store page is a bit confused, however, but it’s better than it was. Last night, iTunes actually thought that the PreviewCast page was the amacgenius.com page! Anyway, they usually get everything fixed up within 24 hours, so hopefully by this time tomorrow, all of the episodes will be up on there. If you are subscribed in iTunes, however, that should be right as rain, I’m only talking about the actual listing on the iTunes Store Podcast Directory.

You’ll notice that a number of things are missing. All of the comments that were on the site, and a number of the miscellaneous blog posts as well, are no longer here. This is because I had to go back through the archive and manually repost each old post on here through WordPress, which takes considerable time (just reposting the 14 episodes + the trailer took over an hour and a half). So, the only posts which were restored were the episode posts, and no comments were restored, because they’re relatively insignificant, and I have lots of other things that I need to do with my time (like, for example, finish editing episode #014). In restoring stuff, I’ve also made a few changes to try to streamline things as best possible. For example, the old S02E00X numbering system has now completely disappeared, and the first 8 episodes have now been renumbered with the new system. Other bits of the site have also been extended upon.

All in all, as the maintenance progressed, it really became apparent how overdue it was. I don’t know if the database was messed up or something, or maybe something was corrupted somewhere, but the reinstallation of WordPress has resulted in a major speed boost for WordPress. Posts post much faster and no longer hang, which means that episode 13 could finally be added to the feed. Hopefully this means that I won’t have to pull as many strings behind the scenes to get new episodes to show up in iTunes too.

Anyway, PreviewCast.com is back (yay!) and live once again. If your feed readers or iTunes are completely messed up for whatever reason from the outage, simply unsubscribe and resubscribe to our feed address and everything should go fine. As for the iTunes Store, hopefully they’ll update fairly soon. They haven’t let us down before.

And, lastly, what about PreviewCast #014? I know a lot of people have been anxious for our interview with Leah Culver, and rightfully so. The editing is about half-finished, however I put the website maintenance on here on higher priority. I’m going off to finish my homework right now (cause that stuff does have to get done), and then will hop back to work on episode 14. Though there is a small chance that the episode is released tonight, I’m planning to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas tonight, so I’d say it would be more likely that I’ll have it out tomorrow morning. You can probably expect to see it on the site by 11 AM Eastern time tomorrow.

Thanks for suffering the inconvenience of the offline website! I know you’ll enjoy reaping the benefits!

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