TheOutloud - a service for short audio blogs and podcasts

Recently, I have had a lot of free time and I decided to return to the project, which I talked about about six months ago. If someone does not remember, then, as a programming practice, I put together a small site where all users could post their personal voiceovers for articles, posts and other audio materials. The project, as it was, remains absolutely free, there is not even an advertisement and a directive that can be seen on many other sites.

In general, over the past six months, the project showed some stability in development: there were daily users, bit-by-bit voice and stories were downloaded, bugs were corrected in some places, and updates were made. Many pages of voiced files even began to be separately ranked in search engines, which I also really liked. On New Year's holidays, I decided to update it a bit and try to fill it with interesting tracks.



During all this time, the main idea and purpose of the site has changed several times. As you remember, initially I planned to do it only for posting posts and stories that any user could find on the network or invent and upload to the site. Then I saw it rather as a place where people go to listen to the latest news or funny stories from life, a kind of mixture of RIA Novosti and Picabu.

Over time, I realized that this format is not very popular with users, and voicing a sufficient number of new stories myself became problematic. It is rather not technically, but as a material. I just did not want to share what I myself would not listen to. And it took a lot of time to search for cool texts.

Then I decided to find a different approach to the development of the project.

For all the time I worked on it, I fell in love with it quite strongly. Yes, it is far from perfect in technical terms, you need to work on design and user-friendliness, but it is cool: open to everyone, free, musical, lamp, in the end. And I decided that I would definitely find my niche for him.

In mid-December, several bloggers wrote to me asking if the project was still alive. And I thought, why not update it and make it the first platform for short audio blogs and podcasts. And, mind you, the "audio blogging" I put in the first place.

I know a huge number of people who like to communicate with their subscribers in different social networks. Even out of boredom, they can record stories and send a voice message to the chat with what is simply on their mind. So why not let all users write down their thoughts and ideas and share them with others?

Just imagine: there is Instagram for photos and stories, Youtube for videos, TikTok for short videos, and TheOutloud will be a platform for sharing audio files.

One will be able to talk about various topics without fear that the light is falling in the wrong way or “the video is not for them,” others will be able to upload their music tracks, and others will find a new channel for communicating with subscribers.

This is a great resource for people who do not like to shoot videos or write long texts. Speak to the recorder and upload to the site. Simple and fast.

It is in such a resource that I believe and want to develop , so I decided to upgrade!

First of all, I redid the visual part a bit: now there are full-fledged profiles of authors, on which you can immediately subscribe or listen to all their tracks without registration. Also on the main page now there is a block with new and popular authors. Sections of the site are now conveniently located at the very top of the page.

Work with tracks was supplemented a little. Now you can upload your track to the site, and then add a link to your personal site or blog, similar to a Youtube video. Now you can also share a link to a video in various social networks in a couple of clicks. They wrote to me that many needed this option very much.

Simplified uploading tracks to the site. Now you do not need to specify the length of the track - less than 5 minutes, more and so on. The site itself will determine its duration and fill it in the desired section.

You can speed up the playback of a track by 2 times. I don’t know why this might be necessary, but several users asked me to add this feature.

The site also remembers the place where you left off in listening to the track. The next time you open it, it will start playing from the last saved point.

Well, other errors in displaying on mobile devices have been fixed and the speed of the site has been improved.

Let me remind you that this project is completely free and without ads. I already know that soon there will be big problems with the size of the hosting and file storage, but I will solve them as they become available. While my knowledge is not enough, I will be glad to all the tips and tricks.

Oh yes, I ask designers for a separate piece of advice. I also understand that the design of many elements leaves much to be desired, so I just ask for advice or examples of how all this can be improved and made more attractive visually and convenient for the end user.

You can see my project at the link - theoutloud.ru

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/undefined/