Story of Podcastpedia.org


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The beginnings

It all began back 2002, my first year at the university in Romania, when I wanted to improve my German skills. At that time my grammar was pretty good, my writing skills were satisfying, but I still had difficulties expressing myself and understanding what the Germans are talking about on TV. Being a self-taught kind of person, I began looking for ways to improve that. On my research I stumbled upon Deutsche Welle’s website, which had lots of useful resources for learning German. I first listened to Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten (Slowly Spoken News), which turned out to be very accesible and easy to understand. Then followed „Deutsch – warum nicht?“ (German- why not?) and „Marktplatz“ (marketplace). Back then you could download audio files with transcripts from the website – I still have like half of tree worth of paper of that lying in my basement, sorry…

Some years passed by and when I checked the website again I found out I could download the files and follow the preferred series by subscribing to podcasts. According to wikipedia:

„A podcast is a type of digital media consisting of an episodic series of audio radio, video, PDF, or ePub files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device. The word is a neologism derived from “broadcast” and “pod” from the success of the iPod, as audio podcasts are often listened to on portable media players.“

Awesome… looking for podcasts I discovered video podcasts from DW like Motor mobil: Das Automagazin, Euromaxx series, then from other German providers – Quarks & Co (great feed, which I still follow regularly), and from BBC and and and… A new world of possibilites had just opened for me to improve my German, English and download and listen to the things I was interested in, whenever I wanted. Back then my GPS device was my companion for that, but today I am only using it for navigation.

Registering Podcastpedia.org

Podcastmania.ro

The multitude of podcasts and podcast directories on the web, led me to believe they must be really appreciated and we should have something like that in the Romanian web space. The timing was perfect as I also wanted to learn how to develop websites with Java (those were JSP-, Struts- or programming your own MVC API with servlets times) and was looking for something motivating to do.

So I registered Podcastmania.ro (podcast.ro was taken at that time). Besides helping me to become a Java Guru, the website would also generate good profits from ads by partnering with producers. The “generate good profits” part was shattered quickly, as you could count the podcasts in Romanian on your fingers – this still holds true today.

Podcastmania.eu

Then the next best thing to do was to register Podcastmania.eu, which would have also been an international and multi-lingual podcast directory. Of course profits were still part of the equation, especially because ads could be placed more accurate, relevant to country, language and category. This was in 2009, after my graduation. I started working on the project, have been developing after work, on weekends, I had arguments with my lovely wife about this, then 13 months ago I received the most wonderful gift, my son Sebastian, and work became a bit more challenging

working with baby

Who said men can’t do multi-tasking?

baby's support

… or take good care of babys?

but with a positive attitude

positive attitude

I have pushed things through.

Podcastpedia.org

Podcastmania.eu felt about right at the beginning, but as my expectations and attitude towards life, people, money, and the world have been evolving dramatically, it started to feel like something was missing… As nature takes care of any gaps, the one between Podcastmania.eu and the urge to do something meaningful was filled, just shortly before going live, when Podcastpedia.org came as a morning inspiration.

Podcastpedia.org is an ads-free podcast directory and, with the motto is all about “Educating oneself “ with selected podcasts from various domains such as science, technology, education, medicine, people, environment, spirituality and much more…

Developing Podcastpedia.org was/is a great technical and personal experience, that I want to share with you on this blog.

What’s next? {##whatiscoming}

What lies ahead we never know for certain, but what Podcastpedia’s agenda concerns, the following tasks are planned:

  • improve the mobile user-friendliness (enough room for improvement at the time of this writing…)
    • considering responsive web design
    • any suggestions ?…
  • introduce wiki pages, at first to simplify collobaration for internationalization (next languages considered Spanish, Polnish)
    • considering Apache JSPWiki
    • convince some friends to help
    • contact us if you want Podcastpedia.org localized in your language
    • any suggestions ?…
  • weekly posts on Codepedia.org
  • open source the website / project
    • considering GIT
    • any suggestions ?…
  • build a platform for podcast producers
  • any suggestions ?…

Please help take the story further to build an open and ads free media platform to visit, if you want to learn German, learn how to make Pasta or how our brain functions.

As you can see I’ve already got some trustworthy coding support

but any extra hand is much appreciated

THANK YOU

A lot of effort has been invested in Podcastpedia.org, but I wouldn’t have made it so far if it hadn’t been for the software communities, open source projects, podcast producers, great technical blogs and all the people out there that are bringing us further.

THANK YOU and let us never stop learning and asking questions!!!

References

The podcasts listed in the directory have been mainly collected from the internet and some have been recommended directly. Podcastpedia.org has no influence on the contents and details of the podcasts. These are provided from the producers’ websites. For @Copyright information please visit the individual producer’s website – this is listed with every podcast in the directory. If you are a podcast producer and you don’t want your podcast listed in the directory please contact us contact [AT] codepedia dot org or contact [AT] podcastpedia DOT org

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Adrian Matei (aka adixchen)

Adrian Matei (aka adixchen)
Life force expressing itself as a coding capable human being

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