about the bugcast

a history lesson

In early March 2008, I was sitting idly listening to a couple of podcasts that I'd started listening to. One was Dumbed Down Life and the other was The Random Three. It was whilst listening to these shows that I thought to myself, "it'd be fun to do this". So I found some software for my laptop, got myself a cheap headset, and set to work.

On a quiet evening on Wednesday 5 March 2008 whilst my wife was at the gym and the kids were in bed, I worked out a format, downloaded some songs from the Podsafe Music Network and set to work. At about 22:00, episode 1 of The Bugcast was born. Now, at this point I hadn't even written the website or feed with which I could publish my new podcast to the masses, but I sorted that out quite quickly and released the show to the world on Friday 7 March 2008.

Since then, the show has undergone a number of changes and milestones:

Ep#	Date	Event
005	04/04/08	Started asking listeners to submit their own show intros
024	15/08/08	First live show New music source - Ariel Publicity
025	22/08/08	Special edition - Silver Podiversary
027	08/09/08	Went from 3 songs per episode to 5
029	26/09/08	Proud member of the Association of Music Podcasting
030	03/10/08	First co-host - the wife!
032	17/10/08	First show with music from an artist that has approached me directly
033	26/10/08	Presence on MySpace
037	21/11/08	First regular feature - the comedy song
042	02/01/09	New domain - thebugcast.org
044	16/01/09	Artist special with interview - Anyone's Guess Presence on Facebook and Twitter
046	30/01/09	New music source - Jamendo
050	27/02/09	Special edition - Golden Podiversary
051	06/03/09	Artist special with interview - Mark Marshall
052	13/03/09	New music source - IODA Promonet
057	17/04/09	First live interview over Skype - Mark Marshall
059	08/05/09	The Bugcast is now being syndicated on realRADIO1
060	15/05/09	New music source - Platform One Entertainment
064	19/06/09	Changed theme tune from Chris Juergensen to Mark Markshall as a trial Went from 5 songs per episode to 6
067	10/07/09	Compromised with Chris Juergensen as intro and Mark Markshall as outro
069	24/07/09	Launch of the new Bugcast Chatroom
074	04/09/09	Caroline joins the show as a permanent co-host! Purchase of new hardware for podcasting

so, how does he do it?

I use a piece of software called IDJC, running under Linux on my laptop. Below is a small image showing IDJC in action. Click on the image for a full-size version.