Hacker Public Radio FAQ (draft)

A collection of questions and answers with links to the HPR site

HPR Contributors

Table of Contents

Hacker Public Radio FAQ

0.1 What is Hacker Public Radio?

  • Hacker Public Radio (HPR) is an Internet Radio show (podcast) that releases shows 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 a series of shows 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 recent question on the mailing list asks 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?

    • The consensus of opinion is that HPR is a Podcast contributed to by the community.

0.2 What is a show?

  • 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:

    • a synopsis taken from the details submitted with the show (added automatically)
    • acknowledgement of our hosting provider (added automatically)
    • HPR introduction music, can be added automatically or by you

  • 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 do this though.

0.3 Can I submit a show made for another podcast?

  • 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.

0.4 What defines a show as being "Produced for Hacker Public Radio"?

  • If you create material and post it first on HPR then it meets the requirements of "being produced for HPR". That means once you upload it to the HPR server you can publish it anywhere else you like.

0.5 What are the mandatory elements of an HPR show?

  • 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:

    • A show title
    • A summary of what the show is about
    • The explicit/clean flag
    • License
    • Show notes
    • Tags
    • Audio

0.6 Is it OK if I don't include notes with my show?

  • No, please don't do that. It is important to provide good show notes for reasons described on the Picking a slot for your show page:
    • They provide the listeners with more information on the topic
    • They ensure your show gets posted on time
    • They encourage people to download your show
    • They allow your show to be indexed by search engines
    • They make your show accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing

0.7 How do I include photographs or other files with my show?

  • TBA

0.8 What is and is not edited in a show after submission?

  • 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, 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.

    • If what is submitted is plain text we convert it to Markdown in order to generate HTML.
    • If the notes are one of the permitted markup formats (mostly Markdown) we may adjust this to ensure that valid HTML is generated.
    • If the notes are HTML we run them through an HTML checker and correct any mistakes it highlights.
    • We may correct spelling, grammar and punctuation if this clarifies anything which might otherwise be unclear.
    • If despite the request for show notes of some kind, none are provided, we may add notes which help to clarify the content of the show. This may be done after the show is released (when we have had a chance to listen to it).

  • 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.

0.9 What are some common errors in show notes?

It depends on the note format to some extent:

0.9.1 HTML notes

  • 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.

0.9.2 Markdown notes

  • This is quite a forgiving format. Some people embed HTML in the Markdown, and the HTML used suffers from some of the issues discussed in this document. These are much harder to spot. The HTML checker can't really help unless it's run on the output from Pandoc.

0.9.3 General errors

  • 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.

0.10 If I notice an error in my show's details how can it be fixed?

  • 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.

0.11 Does hobbypublicradio.com have anything to do with HPR?

0.12 How can I talk to other HPR hosts and listeners?

  • You have a number of choices:
    • The mailing list is where various policy matters are discussed and announcements made. You need to be a member of the list to post to it. Visit the listinfo page to sign up.
    • You can join the #oggcastplanet channel on IRC. Visit the freenode.net network to sign up.
    • A number of HPR messages may be found on Twitter (tag #hpr) and Mastodon (tag #hpr).
    • TBA - Matrix? Telegram?
    • An HPR tradition exists where we record a 26-hour show at the turn of the year celebrating the arrival of the New Year around the world. We use Mumble to record the show and anyone can connect to the Mumble server and speak to other HPR listeners and hosts. The recording is used to make multiple shows which are released when they are ready.