In early March 2008, I was sitting idly listening to a couple of podcasts that I’d started listening to. One was Dumbed Down Life and the other was The Random Three. It was whilst listening to these shows that I thought to myself, “it’d be fun to do this”. So I found some software for my laptop, got myself a cheap headset, and set to work.
On a quiet evening on Wednesday 5 March 2008 whilst my wife was at the gym and the kids were in bed, I worked out a format, downloaded some songs from the Podsafe Music Network and set to work. At about 22:00, episode 1 of The Bugcast was born. Now, at this point I hadn’t even written the website or feed with which I could publish my new podcast to the masses, but I sorted that out quite quickly and released the show to the world on Friday 7 March 2008.
Since then, the show has undergone a number of changes and milestones:
| Ep# | Date | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 005 | 04/04/08 | Started asking listeners to submit their own show intros |
| 024 | 15/08/08 | First live show New music source – Ariel Publicity |
| 025 | 22/08/08 | Special edition – Silver Podiversary |
| 027 | 08/09/08 | Went from 3 songs per episode to 5 |
| 029 | 26/09/08 | Proud member of the Association of Music Podcasting |
| 030 | 03/10/08 | First co-host – the wife! |
| 032 | 17/10/08 | First show with music from an artist that has approached me directly |
| 033 | 26/10/08 | Presence on MySpace |
| 037 | 21/11/08 | First regular feature – the comedy song |
| 042 | 02/01/09 | New domain – thebugcast.org |
| 044 | 16/01/09 | Artist special with interview – Anyone’s Guess Presence on Facebook and Twitter |
| 046 | 30/01/09 | New music source – Jamendo |
| 050 | 27/02/09 | Special edition – Golden Podiversary |
| 051 | 06/03/09 | Artist special with interview – Mark Marshall |
| 052 | 13/03/09 | New music source – IODA Promonet |
| 057 | 17/04/09 | First live interview over Skype – Mark Marshall |
| 059 | 08/05/09 | The Bugcast is now being syndicated on realRADIO1 |
| 060 | 15/05/09 | New music source – Platform One Entertainment |
| 064 | 19/06/09 | Changed theme tune from Chris Juergensen to Mark Markshall as a trial Went from 5 songs per episode to 6 |
| 067 | 10/07/09 | Compromised with Chris Juergensen as intro and Mark Markshall as outro |
| 069 | 24/07/09 | Launch of the new Bugcast Chatroom |
| 074 | 04/09/09 | Caroline joins the show as a permanent co-host! Purchase of new hardware for podcasting |
| 100 | 12/03/10 | 100th episode!! |
| 18/04/10 | Complete redesign of the website, using WordPress – post | |
| 13/02/11 | Totally migrated the podcast files from Libsyn to archive.org | |
| 19/02/11 | New theme on the website Now producing an Ogg Vorbis Feed – post |
Obviously the story doesn’t end there, and there will be more appearing here soon.