Behind Thurrott.com: Podcast Problems

I’ve wanted to update the Thurrott.com header—that bit above the top-level menu—for quite some time, to prominently call out our newsletters and podcasts, and my books and other related content. Like so many things, this redesign keeps getting pushed back as I succumb to the day-to-day realities of needing to create content and handle other business-related issues. And this past month was a doozie.

The biggest issue was getting our taxes done: We took over the business a year ago March, and so this was one of many firsts when it comes to owning and managing a business, and one of the bigger ones. Not helping matters, we never paid taxes last year, or contributed to our retirement accounts, so we had to get caught up on both. Plus, we moved twice in 2023, complicating our local taxes even further. But we got it done, somehow, though it came right down to the wire. (We found ourselves signing papers at our accountant’s office yesterday afternoon, Tax Day.) And we’re still standing. So that’s all good.

But the other big issue from the past month concerned our First Ring Daily podcast and, as odd as this may seem, it was tied to the Thurrott business transition and to the timing of our one-year anniversary: In March, the feed that pushes First Ring Daily out to Apple, Google, Spotify, and podcast clients of all kinds suddenly stopped working.

Long story short, this was what we hope will be the last disruption related to the business transition. That is, before March 2023, everything related to Thurrott.com—our business accounts, payrolls, the services we subscribe to and pay for, and so on—was handled by George and Blue Whale Web. And then that March, we started transitioning it all over to me, or, more formally, to a new company called Thurrott LLC.

I wrote previously about how gracious George was during and beyond this transition, and that helped enormously. As each month ticked by, we would take on more of the responsibility of running the business, financially and logistically. And not quite every month, but often enough, some unique new issue—an annual bill, oftentimes, or a small detail everyone had somehow overlooked—would pop up, and we’d scramble to fix it. And not just fix it, but hopefully ensure that it wouldn’t be a surprise a year later if and when it recurred.

I guess there were more surprises in the beginning, and then things started to calm down, or maybe I’m just blanking on the timing of things. But as we entered this past March, our one-year anniversary, I can’t say that I was thinking about these things anymore. The business was moving along to whatever degree, and I could think more proactively about whatever changes I’d like to make. Like that header.

And then the podcast feed died.

With that, I realized we had one more business transition-related issue to resolve, one final detail that, through a random bit of timing, hadn’t come up in the previous 11 months. For all the discussions, planning, and account transitions we’d made, we’d overlooked this one thing. Put simply, the service we’d been using to host each podcast episode and publish our feed had shut us down because of an unpaid bill I wasn’t even aware of.

This should have been simple to fix: I could look through all my transition notes and documentation, find the sign-ins I needed to access this account, pay the bill, and get on with life. But I couldn’t find that information anywhere, and neither could my wife. And so I spoke with both Brad (who records, edits, and posts First Ring Daily) and George to figure out which account(s) and services were involved. I figured this was still associated with George and BWW somehow.

And it was, sort of. Unfortunately, the person who had set this all up for us was no longer at BWW and hadn’t been for a few years, and so his BWW account was closed. And that meant that whatever automated email warnings this service had sent out were being blasted into the ether. And so Brad and I worked to figure out what we could do to resuscitate or recreate the feed and get First Ring Daily back online (beyond YouTube, where Brad posts the video version manually).

I won’t bore you with the details of that work, but it took a while, and we thought we were done at least twice, only to discover that the new feed wasn’t being propagated to certain endpoints. Brad got Apple and Google fixed first, and then I finally reached out to Pocket Casts to correct that. And then this morning, Brad figured out how to get into Spotify, our final missing piece, but he let me do it so I could take over that feed in another small example of the business transition work I thought we were done doing.

I think it worked: We inadvertently did this live on today’s First Ring Daily, but I signed up for Spotify for Podcasters and successfully took over our feed, and it should start working sometime today, maybe even before you see this. (Update: It is updated on Spotify now.) So that’s good. Sadly belated, but good.

With that out of the way, I should be able to fully control the distribution of the podcast, and fix any issues that may arise in the future, and without any weird account problems or delays. But Laurent threw an interesting wrench into this success when we discussed this issue this morning. He asked where we hosted the podcast and how much it costs. And when I told him—Blubrry, we pay $20 per month for hosting—he suggested that I switch to Spotify for hosting. It’s free, and it handles hosting and feed federation. And, well, it’s Spotify.

This makes nothing but sense. But having just spent five weeks spinning my wheels on this issue, I dreaded screwing with it again. But you know what? I have to. It’s a terrific idea, obviously.

I will wait until I’m sure that the feeds are all fixed and working. But it looks like Spotify can handle this transition easily and without breaking anything. And I’d be an idiot not to make it happen. So I will.

First, I’d have to break it to Brad. He wasted more time trying to fix this than I did, and I’m sure he was even more ready to move on. And now I was going to throw another grenade into the room. So I fired up Skype and started typing.

“Hey, buddy…”