This has been an exciting process, bringing a podcast online and making it work for us and for people who share our keen interest in hammock camping. Not only have there been a number of technical challenges that we’re still working through (including figuring out how to get the best sound quality), but we’re also still learning not to say “um, ah, er” when we’re doing an interview.

One of the very interesting challenges was to figure out if we were actually reaching any listeners. We know that there are a few out there, because we get some very nice comments on our facebook page and here on the website, but we didn’t know a lot about how podcast software works – turns out that you have to host your own files and they aren’t downloaded from the index service (like Apple) but rather from a location stored on one’s own servers.

Hosting the files on Amazon S3 meant that we would have great performance for our listeners to download the podcasts themselves, but we lost the ability to track the number of times the people download our content – we can only see when people look at our web page.

Jonathan did a bit of research, and found a great solution for this – s3stat.com – and we’ve been really happy with the success of the podcast, along with the great quality of the s3stat output in analyzing the downloads out of our AWS S3 bucket. As of this writing, here’s our current listener stats:

Episode 0 (Meet the hosts):  724 downloads
Episode 1 (Shug Emery):  2211 downloads

Wow! we are amazed at the reception of our product and how many people enjoyed the content. Now I go onto the s3stat.com website every few days to see what our content viewing looks like. The one challenge that we have is that we do the podcast for free, and hosting itself already costs a bit of money to run the website and the S3 bucket. The guys over at s3stat has a “cheap bastard” plan for the little guys like us, however, and we’re really excited about that. For small consumers like ourselves, s3stat will give us the analysis data for free. If you’re running an S3 bucket for your static content and are operating a business, we very highly recommend the product, as it really fits a very unique need and does it very well. Much praise to s3stat.com!