By now I hope you've had a chance to look around the new totgu.com website. It's been almost a year that we've been doing the podcast, and we felt the time was right to clean the place up a bit.
Originally we were most concerned with getting the shows onlne and available. Libsyn served that purpose very well (and very affordable). The rest of our web presence was cobbled together from various free services. Google provided the basis, with Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger, and Google Pages for the main site. YouTube and Flickr gave us some media sharing ability. Of course we must thank The Comic Fourms for giving us space for our message board. A large part of our community came from there, and it continues to grow.
As that community and our presence grew, it became apparent that we were outgrowing those free tools. Well, if we were going to move, we're going to do it right. The main goal of the new website, bring all our of our services into one webhost, incuding hosting our episodes.
What I found was www.dreamhost.com. I know of a few other podcasts that are using them, including Comic Geek Speak. Right around the new year, they were running a special for 2 years of hosting for the cost of 1, with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. In short, that means we'll have no problem hosting all of our episodes, pictures, and even video content. Seperate video podcast feed, anyone?
The real heart of the site is a content management system I was introduced to. Joomla allowed me to quickly and professionally build the new totgu.com from the ground up without having to code the entire thing from scratch. Which is good, because while I was making progress with PHP and MySQL, my skills couldn't get me near what Joomla has allowed me to build.
The best part of the system is if I want to add a feature, it's just a matter of installing an extension. Podcast manager, flash player, and video codecs were all just a few clicks away. Best of all,the entire site can be customized by simply changing the template. Of course if you know what you're doing you can even modify it further by changing the CSS code.
I hope you enjoy exploring the new site. New episodes show up every Tuesday (well, Monday night mostly, but never later than Tuesday) and you never know when a video or other treat will show up, So check back oftern and let us know you were here. Leave a comment, or join us over at The Comic Forums, we're only a click away.