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Many podcasters eventually stop podcasting. Sometimes it's a temporary hiatus, sometimes it's an extended break between seasons, and sometimes it's indefinitely due to external factors.

For folks who are no longer producing episodes, a full Pinecast Starter subscription—or any hosting service subscription—can be expensive to maintain, especially if the podcast is unlikely to grow very much over time. Keeping the show online is desirable, but the continued hosting cost can be burdensome.

Pinecast Icebox is a solution for these folks: it allows you to place your account into a low-cost annual subscription in exchange for read-only access while maintaining most of the features of our Starter plan.

Pricing

The Icebox is priced at $2/mo, billed annually ($24 at the time of enablement and every year thereafter). The cost of enabling the Icebox is prorated. As with all of our subscriptions, the Icebox applies to your whole account rather than individual podcasts.

Add-on packages are not available for Icebox customers.

Eligibility

You are able to enable the Icebox if your account has not uploaded an episode in the past 60 days. If you're not yet eligible, you'll be able to see your eligibility on the My Subscription > Icebox tab on your account dashboard.

If you'd started your podcast on our demo plan, you can upgrade to Starter and immediately upgrade (with prorated payment) to the Icebox, provided you otherwise meet the eligibility criteria.

Get started

To check your eligibility and to enable the Icebox, visit the My Subscription page in your dashboard and click the Icebox tab.

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We now support dark mode in our dashboard, tip jar, and short links.

We'll use your system dark mode setting by default. You can update this on a per-computer (and per-browser) basis by visiting Settings > Profile from your main dashboard and clicking the "Dark Mode" option: https://pinecast.com/dashboard/settings

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You can now submit to and link your podcast with Boomplay on the Distribution tab of your podcast dashboard.

Shows submitted to Boomplay will appear in the Boomplay app, which is available for iOS and Android.

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You can now mark your podcasts as finished. Doing this indicates to apps and directories that your show is unlikely to receive new episodes. This adds the <itunes:complete> tag to RSS feeds, and the expired member to JSON Feeds.

Besides indicating to third parties that your show is finished, this also groups finished shows together at the bottom of your main dashboard, as well as on the "Shows" tab for networks. If you have many podcasts, where some have stopped releasing new episodes, this helps to keep your dashboards tidy and easy to navigate.

You can enable this feature at the bottom of the Settings > Podcast Details tab on your podcast dashboard.

Improvement

Version 1.2.0 makes some changes to reduce the complexity of the plugin and make some minor UI improvements. However, the real star of the show is our improvements to better support folks who use the plugin with many podcasts (e.g., a dozen or more).

By default, the plugin has historically updated every episode if there were changes on Pinecast. However, this requires fetching episode details for every episode and comparing each field that could have changed. For podcasts with large numbers of episodes (or sites with a large number of podcasts), this introduces a number of bottlenecks:

• WordPress is often installed on multi-tenant hosting, which is CPU-constrained, slowing the sync process down
• Each post requires a database query (or every post needs to be fetched from the database), which makes the database a bottleneck for performance
• Some versions of PHP are not well-optimized for doing this work, and can run slowly due to the way memory and computation works under the hood

These problems can lead to timeouts—even when syncing a single show.

Every podcast now has a setting to allow only new episode or recent episodes (episodes published in the last thirty days) to be synced. Choosing one of these options will skip updates to old or existing episodes. For folks with dozens of podcasts or thousands of episodes, it's unlikely that these old posts will have substantive changes. Choosing one of the new options will dramatically improve the sync performance of the plugin.

The new version of the plugin is available through WordPress right now. If you have the plugin installed, simply follow your normal plugin update procedure. If you don't have the plugin installed, you can search for "Pinecast" on the plugins tab on your WordPress admin dashboard.

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In addition to our "Listens by agent" view, you can now see the change in listens broken down by podcast app or browser over time with the "Listens by agent over time" view.

This view is available for all customers on the Starter plan.

Improvement

In the past, the "Listens by OS" view was only available for podcasts. You'll now find it listed for episodes and networks.

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One of our most-requested features has been annual billing. You can now pay for one year of service up-front.

Additionally, you'll be able to switch your existing monthly subscriptions to annual subscriptions and vise versa. You can do this by visiting My Subscription > Billing Period.

When switching to or from monthly to annual billing, you'll be invoiced for the prorated difference, with credits being applied to your account. If you have add-ons, they'll be billed in the same way. Adding or removing add-ons from an annual subscription also works like this.

Said another way: previously we'd never charge your payment method immediately upon upgrade or downgrade. Now, we'll only maintain that invariant when adding and removing add-ons from a monthly subscription. Otherwise you'll be billed at the time of upgrade.

Another quick note: this affects the referral program. Monthly subscriptions will continue to maintain the two month behavior. With annual subscriptions, account credit is created at the time of upgrade.

Improvement

We've made it easier for your paid subscribers to listen to your private podcast content.

If you publish private episodes for recurring tip jar subscribers, they'll now have the ability to listen to your show right from their browser. Here's how they can find it:

1. Visit https://tips.pinecast.com and sign in with their email
2. Click on Active Subscriptions
3. Click on your podcast
4. Scroll down to "Listen to the show"

Previously, subscribers needed to use a podcast app to subscribe to a unique, private RSS feed. That option is still available, but your listeners can also see and hear all of your episodes (private or public) directly from this page. Clicking on an episode, they'll see a player along with your episode's show notes.

We'll also keep track of which episodes your subscribers listen to and when. This makes it easy for them to keep track of what they've heard as they go through your backlog. When an episode is played, we'll keep track of that and show it in the episode list.

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You can now protect your account with multi-factor authentication (specifically, TOTP). Visit the Settings > 2FA tab on your main account dashboard to set up a second authentication factor.

Our implementation works with all major TOTP apps, including Google Authenticator and Duo.

We recommend that you set this up as a means to protect your account and podcasts, especially if you use our Tip Jar feature.