Hacker Public Radio (HPR) is an Internet Radio show (podcast) that releases shows (episodes) every weekday Monday through Friday.
What differentiates HPR from other podcasts is that the shows are crowd sourced from the community — fellow listeners like you. There is no restriction on how long shows can be, nor on the topic you can cover, as long as they are not spam and "are of interest to Hackers".
If you want to see what topics have been covered so far just have a look at our Archive. We also allow for shows to be grouped into series so that hosts can go into more detail on a topic.
Look at the About HPR page for a full description of The HPR Community, Free Culture, Governance and our Patrons.
A question on the mailing list in 2020 asked if HPR is a Content Publication Network like YouTube, or is it a Podcast that random people contribute to? Or to put it another way, is the host addressing the Internet in general or the HPR Audience?
A show is your audio presentation (which we do not moderate), with an intro, outro, a title and a summary.
The audio is the recording you have made and sent in to HPR.
The intro (introduction) is a piece of audio introducing the show. See HPR Theme Music for details. The components are:
The outro is added automatically, but you can add it yourself if you want. It must contain the HPR outro music and the text you will find on the HPR Theme Music page.
Each show needs a title to describe what it is about.
Similarly, a summary helps to add more information describing the show so a potential listener can decide whether to listen to it or not.
Each show is expected to have certain mandatory attributes listed below.
HPR shows are usually expected to be informative or educational, and as such some sort of accompanying written material is highly desirable. This might consist of brief notes, links to relevant web sites, or possibly longer notes and examples. Photographs, diagrams and example files are also welcome if the host feels it helps to get the message across.
Shows are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. See Stuff you need to know for much more detail about this and related issues.
As a contributor you can choose when your show will be released. We only release one show a day, during week days, but if a slot is free you can claim it. Go to the calendar page to do this. You need to have your show ready to upload before you reserve a slot though.
Strictly, no. Shows are expected to have been made exclusively for HPR.
However, we support promoting new podcasts and other creative commons material. If you record a show of your own in which you introduce the other podcast, perhaps explaining why it is important, and giving links to the feed, you may include an example episode.
A series exists Podcast recommendations, which can be used for such shows.
See Picking a slot for your show for the full details of how to submit a show and what information is required.
A quick summary of the main components is:
We are trying to maintain a collection of tags to allow people to find shows on the same (or similar) topic.
Tags are simple words or short phrases describing aspects of a show such as what topics are covered in it. To get hints about what tags have already been used you can view all the current tags in alphabetical order on this page: Tag summary
Some examples are: android, creative commons and gaming.
Are there any tags that are best avoided?
We don't listen to the audio before posting a show to the website, so we don't change the content.
Unless you have done so and told us you have, we add an introduction to the audio announcing what it is. Similarly we add an outro. This is not editing since we don't change the content.
We may make changes to the show title, summary or tags. Usually these are minor changes such as spelling corrections. The intention is not any sort of censorship, merely to make these items more understandable or easier to index.
Depending on the form the show notes take we may modify these.
We are working on the production of reports about any changes made, which will be sent to the host after we have processed the show.
We may make changes to a show's metadata if the host requests it (see the item on fixing errors after upload).
If a show contains links to resources which disappear after a period of time, we may at some future time change the notes to refer to any Wayback Machine copy that can be found.
It depends on the note format to some extent:
It's very easy to hand-write bad HTML. That's why we use an HTML checker on it, and fix the errors it reports.
A common fault is to write <code><pre> to define a pre-formatted block of text using a fixed-width font. However it's illegal because the <pre> tag can't be enclosed in other tags like <code>. Use <pre><code> instead.
Spelling is often an issue in notes. As the notes are processed they are edited in the Vim editor with the spell check option turned on. In most cases spelling problems flagged by Vim are corrected.
Grammar and punctuation can also be issues. We do not have very effective grammar checking tools in the note preparation workflow. Modifications may be made to split up extra-long (often comma-spliced) sentences, rationalise the use of capital letters and similar.
The HPR administrators can make changes to show titles, summaries, notes and so forth. Ideally send an email to admin at hackerpublicradio.org explaining what the problem is and we'll fix it for you. We'll also ensure that the changes are propagated to the relevant page on archive.org.
Don't be tempted to send in your corrections as a comment. Comments are not propagated to archive.org, so people referring to that copy will not see the changes.
hobbypublicradio.com have anything to do with HPR?Some environments prevent access to sites which use the word 'hacker' or 'hackers' in their names (or content in extreme cases). The site names hobbypublicradio.{com,net,org} have been created, which link to the main HPR site, in order to get around this restriction.
See the mailing list thread here: http://hackerpublicradio.org/pipermail/hpr_hackerpublicradio.org/2015-February/013267.html