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

Over half a million total downloads since we started the show just over two years and two months ago. Pretty amazing, huh? And this is just from our end, who knows who’s out there mirroring and caching the show files as well…

By the way, that flashy graphic is 100% vector (well, except the shiny reflection) and something I whipped up in under an hour, another testament to how awesome Inkscape is! That just in case you are one of these people saying artists need Macs to produce wonderful artwork…

On this day two years ago, the very first episode of Linux Outlaws was released to the world.

In the two years that followed, we got an Ogg feed, moved to Libsyn, were crowned #2 Linux podcast by Linux Format Magazine, created the forum, designed our own merchandising, lost a whole show, started doing interviews, were interviewed ourselves, met for the first time, went to LugRadio Live and Linux Tag, moved to a dedicated server, failed several times, started to stream the recordings live, opened the Outlaw Archives, got into the Top 5 on Podcast Alley, had people cover our show’s theme music, recorded more than 100 shows, and most importantly, had a lot of fun in the process!

We now have consistently more than 6,500 downloads per episode and around 70-100 people watching the live stream each week. The forum has over 1,200 registered members and the official microblogging account (@linuxoutlaws) has more than 1,000 followers on Twitter and more than 500 on identi.ca. Pretty amazing for a little project that started as a crazy, random idea that neither of us thought would go anywhere, huh? But the best news of all: We still love doing the show every week and have no intention to stop doing it. So here’s to more fail-laden Linux reporting, crazy jokes, laugh-out-loud moments, Microsoft-bashing and weird music in the third year of the improbable, non-localised podcasting phenomenon that is Linux Outlaws!

As I have alluded to before, I have for some time been working on my own publishing system for podcasters written in Django. Recently, I have been contacted by Bradley Kuhn who has written the beginnings of a similar system (also using Django) for the SFLC podcast (which Dan produces). Since I am not very far along with my system and Bradley is looking for someone to clean up his codebase and maintain it, we have decided to merge our efforts. The project has been tentatively titled “Podjango” and Bradley has set up a bzr repository and Trac instance for us. We also created #podjango on irc.freenode.net and most development discussions will probably happen there, so join us if you are interested.

In the longrun, I am looking to replace the main part of this site with the new system, but that may be a while. First I need to brush up my Python skills and wade through this code. I’ll keep you all posted…