TigerTails Radio

Look, it’s a post by the website admin, breaking the proverbial 4th wall and speaking to you all directly. Hello, I’m Thomas King and welcome to my ranting…

Well, it’s finally happened.  Only 5 months after starting up, the new look TigerTails Radio website has had to be remade.  Somehow I knew that it was all too easy, and something would go wrong.  Nice to see I was right.  However, that has meant that all the changes I had previously made to the main TigerTails site have been for the best, as it has allowed the installation of WordPress on the TigerTails Entertainment server, which means that the site is back on base turf, and not on someone else’s server.

So have a look at our new home.  I hope you like it.  We’ve gone back to the blues of Seasons 1 and 2, as I still like them even after all these years.  Call it harkening back to the good old days, when websites were coded in HTML and not PHP, and I didn’t have to learn things like WordPress, or even understand databases and how they are important.  Of course, Eeve3 will be pleased that I’ve been dragged (kicking and screaming) in to somewhat modern technology in terms of website administration, but I still miss the days of nested tables and simple tags that were self-explanatory instead of defined div statements and CSS.  Yes, I’m old.  Shut up.

What does this mean for TigerTails Radio?  Nothing, on the surface. Just a fresh coat of paint really.  Of course, it’s very different behind the scenes but that’s for me to worry about, not you.  Podcasts are still held off-site, and all the posts from the Posterous site managed to transfer over just fine (apart from the flash player, which I spent ages adding back), though that involved making a WordPress.com account and porting the site there, before porting it to here.  Long winded, but it works so I’m not going to argue with it.  Or course, I’m typing this before I point the tigertailsradio.co.uk domain in this direction, so that could ruin everything – but chances are, if you’re reading this, it’s all gone correctly.

I guess I had better go back in to my cave of web administration now.  It’s WordPress flavoured now, but at least that means I can poke at it whenever I please.  Or lick the walls.  Probably the latter.

EDIT: It seems WordPress likes to be hard-coded, which means our lovely tigertailsradio.co.uk URL (for now) gets eaten whenever you click on a link, and it reverts back to its actual URL – a tigertails.co.uk one (because all the TigerTails Entertainment sites now run from the same server). Thankfully, tigertailsradio.co.uk still gets you here so it doesn’t really matter I suppose. So in case you were wondering, no there isn’t a problem – this is still www.tigertailsradio.co.uk even though the URL bar says otherwise. Instead of wondering about that, why not go and buy a shirt from the apparel store? Every little helps keep this site alive… Promise.

Well, I’ve just seen some very annoying news.  Our lovely web host Posterous will be closing down at the end of April to concentrate on suckling the lactating tit that is Twitter.  The warning signs were there – it was a big banner saying “We’ve been bought by Twitter” some months ago.  That, and the CEO of Posterous is now a Twitter Product Manager who obviously can’t find the time to keep this product going.  I can speculate lots of between-the-lines reasons why Posterous is closing, but that doesn’t help.

What this means is that the TigerTails Radio website will be down at some point in the near future, for an unknown length of time.  Might be a day or so, might be longer.  Depends on how long it takes me to find a replacement service or learn how to use WordPress.

If the site is due to be down during showtime, our social media (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) pages will have all the connection info, though I’m half tempted to dig the old TTR site out of retirement (it’s mothballed at the moment, so I can easily revert to it) while the changes take effect.  We shall see.

I’ll post more info as and when I can.

– Thomas King

It’s in its early days at the moment, but the TigerTails Apparel Store is now OPEN!  Look for the new Shopping! tab above.  If the store doesn’t load straight away, give it a couple of refreshes – it’s a bit like the Flash Players in that respect.

Of course, while we’re doing this for the fans, we don’t see why it couldn’t also be BY the fans.  So, if you want to help us get some awesome things up in the store, then why not make some TigerTails Radio pictures and send them on to us.  Or if you’ve got shirt-caption ideas, or even if you’re a whizz with graphics and want to send us a nice ‘TigerTails Radio’ logo-type thing – anything like that.  Send it all in, our email address is on the Contact Us page (no attachments larger than 9 meg please – send us a link instead).  

We only recieve a little bit of the price tag, so go crazy and max out those credit cards so we can afford to pay for things like bandwidth and server fees, and things like that!  More importantly, though, enjoy the store – and keep an eye on it for more products coming soon!

The question remains…  Should we open our own T Shirt shop?  With summer coming up, would people want TigerTails branded gear?  What do you think?  Let us know in the comments, or via Twitter or our Facebook page.

Finally, only 11 weeks after the season started properly, the way to bring back the best feature of the old version of the TigerTails Radio website has been discovered.  We can reinstate the Flash Player at long last.

The podcasts are held off-site at Archive.org, and the nice people there provide a media player for the files stored on their site.  We’ve only just discovered this media player supports embedding in a form that our website host allows – Yey!  Okay, silly us for not discovering this sooner, but better late than never, right?

All previous podcast posts have been edited and the flash player added (or it might be HTML5, I have no idea, and nor do I care so long it works), so a couple of forced refreshes might be required to get them to display properly.  Each new podcast related post should have the player from the get-go.  Note:  I say should.  

A very Merry Christmas (/whatever you celebrate/Tuesday) from all of us at TigerTails Radio.  We hope you have a great day and don’t get too drunk or make too much of a fool of yourself in front of other family members (espcially those ones with camera phones and YouTube accounts).

With Christmas day being immediatly after the show, the podcast for Episode 06 is late.  You can watch the TubeCast, however, as that’s an automatic process!  Yey for technology.  The mp3 will most likely surface shortly after Boxing Day so stay tuned.

It’s now time to break out the Christmas music and prepare for a few days of headaches and fun.  No matter how you spend the Silly Season, have fun and stay safe.

See y’all at the New Year!

Yes, today marks the start of TigerTails Radio – Season 7.  We have had 3 test shows to make sure things are working as expected, and while everything isn’t 100% to TK’s satisfaction, things aren’t going to get any better than what they are, so we might as well go ahead.

What new for Season 7 then?  Well, first off, have a look at our nice new website.  Isn’t it pretty?  It’s pretty functional (well it’s not winning any awards for style, put it that way), but certainly a lot better looking than the previous one.

The important things are still around.  The ‘Listen’ page has links to for you to listen with most major media players.  We’re looking for a workaround for the Flash player, so if you used that just sit tight and hopefully it will be back soon.  If the main links don’t work for you, we have the raw server details on hand so you can dump them in to your media player of choice and listen that way,

Podcasts will return, and now have their own section.  Well, ish.  Podcasts will be hosted off-site now, as that reduces our bandwidth commitments.  From now on, each new podcast will be linked to from a post on the main page.  The post will be tagged “Podcast”, and thus by clicking on the podcast link in the top menu, you will be presented with the posts containing the podcasts.  Magic.

The ways and means of contacting us haven’t changed, and links to all our social media sites (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) have been added to the bottom of the “Contact Us” page.  The IRC details are also there, too.

So, that’s the website covered…  What about the show?  Well, our biggest change is the move from Livestream.com to YouTube via Google Hangouts on Air.  Why did we do this?  There’s a few reasons.  Most noteably, the Livestream was low frame-rate crap. It saved a local file to TK’s computer but the quality of video was appalling.  Hangouts on Air aren’t much better in terms of quality, and it eats the broadcasting equipment, but archives are saved to YouTube automatically. This means a TubeCast is available moments after the show has finished each night.  There are also lots of toys for TK to play with (early in the show, before the broadcasting hardware runs out of resources).

The Audiosurf challenge is no more, for the time being.  We will try to work out another challenge instead.  Winners of the Off Season challenge will be announced during the live show tonight.

Old favourites like Review of the Week, The Gaming News, Done and Dusted, and Role Play Talk are back.  The show will follow the regular format, with Review of the Week and The Gaming News taking up the first half of the show, and Done and Dusted followed by Role Play Talk taking up the second.  This should, in theory, give us a good 2 hour show.

Finally, the show now starts from 8pm UK time!  An hour earlier than it used to.  This also means it finishes at 10pm (if it doesn’t over run) so all you Brits can go to bed at a reasonable hour (he says, typing this at 6.30am).

If you made it this far down, congratulations.  Give yourself a pat on the back…  Or a cookie, whichever is easiest.  Why not drop in to IRC during the live show and tell TK you’ve read this bit?  Let him know that typing this post up for over an hour has been worth it.

Enjoy the show.

Taking full advantage of off-site hosting and content management (although the spell checker seems to be broken for this site), the all-new TigerTails Radio website arrives for Season 7, ready and waiting to be used and abused!  This has been a long time coming, though is still in a somewhat experimental phase and therefore might be changed without warning one day if Thomas King (our wonderful web admin person) decides that doing things this way is too much of a pain in the rump.

So, this is the plan.  This is the new site.  It’s all based on tags.  Live show posts will be marked as such, podcast posts will also be tagged.  Links at the top will let you see, at a glance, the posts you want.  It’s like the Listen page and the Main page collided, but with less scrolling and easier sorting.  It also means the front page might see an update more than once a decade.  Might!  You can even comment on posts now, so you can give us your thoughts instantly instead of having to track us down on a social network!

This is all early days though, so give it a few weeks to really shape up.  The design might change randomly, or the site might move to a completely new host (it’s currently a Posterous blog, like a lot of the other TigerTails Entertainment blogs).  Anything could happen.  So join us for the ride, and we hope you enjoy Season 7 of TigerTails Radio!