Frequently Asked Questions

Trivia/FAQs:
[But I'll be honest, nobody has asked any of these questions.]

• Why did you name your show "The Mike Neumann Show"?

Because I was lazy and mikeneumann.show was available.

• Why haven't you just gone back and renamed it to "Breakfast with Dr. Tim"?

I'm lazy and I don't want to change the feed, domain, etc.

• Who do you use as your podcast hosting service?

Primarily me and Linode.

The main motivation for this technical decision is because in order to be able to "Run with Scissors", you have to be able to hold the scissors at all times. In the technology of podcasting, that means that you have to have full control of the content of your RSS feed - at.all.times. This has allowed me, I believe, to contribute a tiny bit back to the Podcasting 2.0 effort by implementing as many of the new tags in the podcast: namespace extension even while they are still in draft. This hopefully helps podcast hosting providers, application (player) developers, indexing services to deal with/consume the draft tags during development. I don't mind being a crash test dummy because actually, all of those words apply. :)

• Ok, so you don't use a host, but what tools do you use?

This is obviously a longer answer, and all subject to change.

Sovereign Feeds is my primary feed authoring tool. StevenB is a champ at keeping up with the Podcasing 2.0 pace.
Pelican static site generator - This page and all of my show notes are written in Markdown and converted in to .html.
Hypercatcher Studio is my primary tool for creating chapters. Chapters are hard work, therefore, I don't have many episodes with complete sets of chapters.
Otter.ai is what I use to generate transcripts. It's pretty good, but Tim and I are championship-level mumblers, and "Newman" is how "nu-man" is going to be interpreted in American English, but you'd think an "AI" would, well... This task takes a LOT of my time to clean-up. I usually post the draft/rough transcript and then go back and clean up later.
Podfather Gear is where I went to learn from, well, The Podfather. My meager skill set does not require all of the hardware and software described there. I started with a microphone and stand, the SONY headphones, the MOTU UltraLite mk4, Hindenburg Lite, an old laptop, and some cables. None of the settings links on that Podfather Gear site will download, so I started from scratch on the MOTU and still have a long way to go in learning that device. It's incredibly powerful.
rsync God bless rsync.
Mail-in-a-Box on Linode - This is probably bad opsec, but it's not that hard to figure out that mikeneumann.show, my feed, and my email are all hosted by a MIAB instance on Linode. I really like the cut of MIAB's jib.
comments.mikeneumann.show existed, but it went away (it was just too much to maintain, and nobody left any comments there anyway - maybe some day again), as the mastodon instance that I stood up following guidance posted by @js on podcastindex.social. Speaking of @js...
Livewire Podcast Validator by John Spurlock is a great way for checking out your feed against not only fundamental RSS rules, but for the developing Podcasting 2.0 namespace extension. Let's see how I'm doing today.