Summary: Alright, I didn’t think anyone would notice the changes because so far they’ve been minor, and also the World Cup is on. But it turns out that a lot of you are rather detail oriented, so you caught me! It’s true, we went from 151 regular episodes to 127 regular episodes. And that change wasn’t a bug on the site, but rather it’s phase one of a number of upgrades that I’m doing on the show. So let me bring you up to speed. First, the reason the episodes had to be renumbered is because we combined some of the cultural episodes into combination episodes. For example, all the feasting and all the wargear episodes are now compiled into their own single long form combo episodes. This means less intros and outros for you, so that’s a bonus right there, and but more importantly the feed will be a bit better organized. Now rather than listening to shorter episodes that were all covering largely the same topic, but because of how the show was released, were spread out all over the place… instead all the shows covering that topic will be in a single place. It makes the show easier to follow, and also should make it easier to share. For example, if you’re in the SCA and want to know everything about food and drink, you can now go to a single episode and download it rather than hunting through the entire feed. So fixing that was phase one… Though in doing that fix, I realized that the intros would need to be rerecorded. Which is also a good thing because I’m going to be able to go back and include important information in the intros like date ranges and major characters to watch. So instead of the intro just being music… or even worse, on some of the early episodes, music plus comments regarding hard drive crashes. Instead, I’m in the process of updating the shows so that the intros will let you know where you are in history and who to keep an eye on. Finally, I’m also re-recording (and doing minor rewrites) on the earlier episodes. Don’t worry, I’m not making Greedo fire first here. I’m just cleaning it up. The reason is that the sound quality, delivery, and writing were all a bit rough. Lets be honest, there are a lot of whatnots in those early days. And the thing is that while poor sound quality and delivery was ok three years ago, Podcasting has come a long way since then and the show needs to keep up if we’re going to keep growing and gaining access to expert interviews. Of course, as the episodes get updated, I’ll be letting everyone know on Facebook and Twitter, so keep an eye on the communities there. And if you’re a fan of the Whatnot drinking game, or if you’re just studying the History of the British History Podcast and you want to know what this “whatnot” business is all about, worry not… I’ve compiled ALL 151 episodes prior to this change into a single zip file and I’ll be making available to the members. So there you go… that’s an overview of what changed last night and of some of the changes going forward. Thanks for listening and for being patient!
