A few suggestions to improve Loudblog

I’ve sat down yesterday and did a quick install Loudblog for testing and curiosity’s sake. Loudblog is supposed to bring audioblogging/podcasting to your PHP-supporting server effortlessly (think of it as “WordPress for podcasts”), and from what I’ve seen thus far, it delivers. It’s got a great UI, it’s powerful, yet simple — I like it.

I’ve played with the latest 0.4 beta, and these are my quick remarks after using it for less than 24 hours. I may update this post if I stumble into more things that seem like they could use some fixing.

• When you write a post, update it, or update your settings (in the “Settings” page), the page reloads with no Success! (or similar) message to help the user realize that his changes were successfully submitted/saved. Some visual feedback is much needed, I think.
• In a post’s “links” section, if you omit the “link description” field, the RSS feed template’s output is: link - . See that <space>-? It’s meant to act as a separator between the link’s name and the (non-existent) link description. An if-clause is needed: if link description == null, then omit the <space>- part.
• From within the “Admin” area, a link to my Loudblog-powered blog would be much appreciated. Preferrably somewhere in the header area.
• The URIs of your Loudblog-powered blog’s permalinks (say this fast!) follow the index.php?id=x schema, where x is an increasing index number. I’d like to go with clean, beautified URIs (a la /2005/11/05/check-out-this-new-track/, if the post’s title is “Check out this new track!”) — think WordPress and the .htaccess rewrite rules here. I could add the same .htaccess hackery on my own, but I’m not sure if that would mess with Loudblog’s stats tracking (Loudblog has built-in stats for tracking podcast downloads). Since the stats are for downloads only, I don’t think I’ll break things, but I want to make sure first. Same thing with the feed — can I use Feedburner and keep enjoying Loudblog’s stats feature?

I bear in mind that we’re talking about the 0.4 version (and a beta, too) and such things are more than likely to exist. I’m merely noting them down in case they’re missed/forgotten. √ Nov 5th, 2005

Neat rating feature

In Elevator Pitch, a place where you pitch your new business/idea, visitors can judge your entry using this neatly designed rating form:

Click on an arrow and you’re done. Simple and functional. √ Nov 2nd, 2005