One of the GRATE delights of The Funny Comics Fan Club (LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE TODAY!) is that it involves lots of Rock Admin. Long-time readers of this here blog will recall that, back in my ROCK POMP, I used to thoroughly enjoy a bit of Rock Admin, so it is very nice to have some of it back in my life. I have spent the past few weeks Tinkering With Websites, Submitting To Podcast Databases and, most excitingly of all, Counting Page Hits.
Counting Page Hits is one of the great lost JOYS of the early interweb, back when we all had one of those COUNTERS on their page so that everyone could see how many times it had been visited. If I remember correctly they tended to start off with a capacity to have a THOUSAND people visit you, although it was mostly a THRILL to think you could ever get to a HUNDRED, for LO! that was about how many people were actually ON the interweb way back then. Nowadays the whole thing is a giddy mess of BOTS and SPIDERS and GOOGLE ANALYTICS and all of that so it is pretty much meaningless, and that early fun has gone off to the great Geocities in the sky.
HOWEVER, our Podbean page tells you EXACTLY how many people have downloaded each EPISODE, and so ever since we UNLEASHED the series I have been watching the counter very gently go up. I was doing exactly that on Monday lunchtime when I receievd a message from my colleague Mr John Dredge to alert me to the FACT that we were mentioned in that day's Podnews newsletter - John has MUCH experience of Publicising Podcasts from his Award Winning Podcast Enterprise The John Dredge Nothing To Do With Anything Show (LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE IMMEDIATELY!) and it was he what had sorted this out.
"How lovely", I thought. "Hopefully this will enable episode one to exceed the 50ish downloads that the trailer got!"
THUS throughout the day I very occasionally (only a few times an hour) went and clicked REFRESH on the website, and watched as the counter did indeed go past our initial 50... and then kept on going. It was WEIRD - it got to 100 downloads within an hour or so, and over the course of the day went up and up and up. It turns out that LOADS of people subscribe to that newsletter, so by close of play yesterday we'd had over SEVEN HUNDRED downloads!
Rather wonderfully I was able to impart this news to an otherwise unaware John Dredge that very day, for LO! we had arranged to meet up to record a new episode after work. We are stacking up quite a healthy back-log of shows, so that it was episode FIVE what we had gathered to record, and we began doing so in HIGH SPIRITS, buouyed not only by the aforesaid downnloads but also by the fact that we were talking about KRAZY COMIC, which (SPOILERS) is FANTASTIC.
However, our glee swiftly turned to HORROR when, forty minutes in, we noticed that the recorder had stopped and, on further investigation, FROZEN! We record on my little digital four-track, which I've had for MANY years and has never done anything like this before, so I've no idea what was going on. It had completely gone KER-PLUNK though, and in the end I had to take the batteries out just to restart it!
ALAS we had lost THE LOT and so we had to pick ourselves up and go right back to the start again, this time recording in shorter bursts and SAVING it. Weirdly it felt like it was all slightly BETTER the second time around, as it forced our MIGHTY BRANES to REPHRASE the thoughts we'd wanted to get across and then to think of NEW things to say, which I am very pleased to say we DID. I'm even more pleased to say that, when I got home and was able to fully CHECK, all these new segments had recorded properly and had WORKED, which was a huge relief!
If we stick to the PLAN of fortnightly episodes then, by my reckoning, this one will be out in OCTOBER, so who knows, by then we might be into QUADRUPLE listener figures. Watch out, G Linekar and R Stewart, we are coming for you!
