The Upgraded Web
A podcast about building for the web — written, recorded, edited, scored, and branded solo, with an affiliate business attached.
The Upgraded Web with Aaron Trank — a podcast about building and hosting things on the web, made in 2015 alongside consulting work and a job at a non-profit.
Everything, by one person
A podcast episode looks like one file and is actually a small production pipeline. I owned all of it:
- The audio. Multitrack Audacity sessions, with the first episode surviving as four separate project files — evidence of an episode assembled and reassembled rather than recorded in one pass.
- The sound design. Custom power-up and power-down cues, so the show had transitions of its own rather than borrowed stock stings.
- The artwork. Cover art rendered at 1400px square for the podcast directories, plus channel art sized for Twitter and YouTube and a wordmark for the site. All of it built in GIMP, like the rest of my identity work from those years.
- The business. An affiliate arrangement with a web host, with the banner inventory and placements that go along with it.
What it was actually for
Teaching, and being findable. The audience was people trying to get a site up and make it good — the same people the prospecting work was aimed at finding, which is no coincidence: I was thinking hard about that customer at the time. A podcast was a plausible calling card in 2015 for someone doing this kind of work.
What I kept from it is a habit rather than an audience: an appetite for explaining technical work to people who do not already understand it, and enough production experience to know that the explaining is the easy half.