Hello once again. I trust everyone has had a nice Christmas? I thought I’d provide a quick update to wrap up the year on this blog as well…

I just released the last episode for the year on Tuesday — we had a lot of fun with this one, recording special sound effects and all. I even drove over a road bump very fast in my Twingo to make it authentic! So that wraps up the podcast itself for 2009, but a few other things have developed that I wanted to talk about on here as well. First off, you might have noticed the Sixgun Productions bumper at the beginning of the show and in the file tags. The site itself explains what we have in mind with this pretty well, so I’ll leave it at that, suffice it to say that we are looking to put Linux Outlaws on a much more solid foundation for the future. Do not despair, we aren’t looking to sell out or have suddenly developed delusions of grandeur like some other podcasters, we are simply trying to make sure that the production of the show can be sustainable for us in the long run so that we can deliver many, many more episodes to you. In the same vein, you will notice the adverts on the main page. This is an experiment to see if we can generate a revenue stream for the show. Both Dan and myself will most likely undergo some changes in our lives in 2010 and this will hopefully help to keep us afloat. I’ve personally never had ads on any of my sites and I’m curious to see how this shapes up. As always, we welcome any comments and feedback in general on this via the usual channels. We have also talked about supporting the show via ads in the content itself a few times, but so far nothing has transpired. No matter what happens, we have quite firmly agreed on never having more than one ad on the show itself. I have seen first hand what more than that will do to a show like TWiT and I don’t want to go down that path. Again, if you have any comments on all of this, please leave them here on the blog or send us an email.

Anyway, the Linux Outlaws wish you all the best for 2010 and the new decade! Here’s to many, many more shows in the new year. I am going to leave you with our Libsyn download stats for the year (as of this morning) and as you can see, the show is really going places. We hope to improve on that even more in the new year!

Libsyn Download Stats for 2009

I have recently compiled statistics on the total downloads of Linux Outlaws show files up to Episode 100 from all available data collected up until July 9 on Libsyn, the Archives and the main server (although there are some missing records between Episodes 9 and 34 that I still need to investigate). In the spirit of a truly open podcast production, I want to share this data with you now. The end result is a total download number of 423,906 downloads in the roughly 22 months since September 12, 2007. Pretty amazing, huh?

If you want to see the nitty-gritty details, you can download the complete ODF spreadsheet and check it out. Also, for all those people who think we shouldn’t be publishing a MP3 file, it might be interesting to see that Ogg Vorbis only makes up 21% of our total downloads. As much as I like Free formats, I think the data speaks for itself.

I am truely stoked about the direction the show is heading, it looks like we are going from strength to strength and I hope we will continue to pick up new listeners and keep entertaining the regulars as well. On that note, if you have any ideas how the podcast can improve, get in touch — we are always welcoming any feedback we receive. And if you are not on board yet, what are you waiting for? It’s loads of fun, even if you aren’t an hardcore Linux geek. Trust me.

Well, as you might have noticed, the server went down once more. Sorry again for any inconvenience the latest outage might have caused. This time it wasn’t my fault. Our server exceeded another limit, in this case its memory allowance. Dan actually had to upgrade us to a business plan. Seems like we were not only pushing considerable bandwith, but there is also quite a bit of load on the server. As you can see from the graphs, our downloads as well as the feed subscriptions are constantly increasing. At this rate we are gonna need dedicated hardware pretty soon…

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is great. When we started this little project, I would have never dreamed of even getting 1,000 downloads per week and we have well exceeded that by now. This whole thing is really amazing and the support we are getting from you on a day-to-day basis makes it well worth it. As for the server, we’ll get something worked out. I just hope we can avoid further downtime from now on. Doing the show is mad fun and I won’t let any silly technical difficulties stop us. As Dan said on the forums, these seem to be minor growing pains that will just make us stronger in the long run. Just like the real outlaws we are, we won’t give up without a last stance! Just bear with us here…