Updates from Plink (good and bad) - more to follow
Hey,
It’s been quite some time, I hope this message finds you and yours doing well!
To recent subscribers, hello 👋 I’m Scott the Founder of Plink! I’m thankful for the support from great customers like you, of what I’m building at Plink!
Updates
Something unique about a service like Plink and the way that it's architected, is that it is somewhat reliant upon other’s innovations, too. From the podcast apps - Spotify, Apple, Google, to Plink’s infrastructure providers, and on.
As they advance, we advance.
The good stuff
There's some advancements with Plink's product that I'm excited to share with you. In short, Plink will help podcasters gain more insights about their podcast marketing efforts via a series of Plink analytics features. Alongside the capability to support custom domains on top of custom links on Plink short domains. Plink's primary cloud provider invited Plink into a limited, private beta to support custom DNS and domain functionality!
So, I’m in the phases of final development of these and other features and will be writing back, after fixing these pesky episode bugs (more below).
Not so good
Well, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies all of the time though, right? As the subject line suggests there’s some recent challenges that arose today, in particular.
Plink’s Show Pages automatically finds and lists up-to-date links to your podcasts in major apps. To programmatically generate things within Plink, it integrates with a growing list of data providers like Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartMedia, and others.
And Plink’s Episode Pages are a feature that I know many of you enjoy and utilize. Starting Friday (02-26-2021, 12:00a), the data that Plink receives from one of its primary providers to generate episode-specific smart links and pages was quite spotty and lagging behind (thanks to Plink user Matthew B. for reporting this).
Needless to say, today was fully dedicated to troubleshooting and wrangling this issue, getting in contact with providers, and even looking into re-architecting some of the episode-specific linking scripts and codebase. 😅
When outages like this happen, I don’t take decisions like having to temporarily hide navigation to Episode Pages on Plink links lightly. Thanks for understanding and know that I’m on it.
All of your Episode links are still indexed in search and can be surfaced, yet I've hidden navigation from your Show Pages to Episodes for now until the outage issues resolve.
Prior to this, I’d just shipped changes to include Stitcher on Show Pages when show their titles match internal database results, and iHeartRadio support is also rolling out!
Everything is working 100% at the show-level, so please do confidently link on! 🔗 Expect to hear another update soon.
Aside: Plink early adopter Emily Binder put together some amazing podcast marketing tips, and, completely flattered I republished this content on Plink's blog here.
More good, upcoming features
I was planning to write you this week with some announcements of more, upcoming features! Again, following resolution of the episode-specific linking, you’ll be hearing back with more information about new features.
There’s been a lot in-development since we've last spoken - from analytics, to custom domains, an improved webapp and link management platform, and other improvements. With this, there’s some pricing updates, but you’ll be offered a loyal customer discounted rate - nothing to make a decision on now, more to follow.
I take pride in delivering a reliable, robust service for podcasters, networks, and media companies. Onto continuing to resolve this episode linking issue with providers and getting support for that back into Plink!
Thanks again for your continuing to use your Plink links!
I do hope that you’re doing well and enjoying creating your podcast! Looking forward to sending a follow-up.
Best,
Scott Mathson, Founder @ Plink