Doing a company vanity search as a somewhat routine Monday-morning
pre-meeting ritual, I noticed a recent makeuseof.com article on how to
set up a TalkShoe podcast.

In Step 4, you discuss calling the show with the call ID, and the PIN:

“Go ahead and open up SJPhone. Now the next part is REALLY important.
You want to enter the following as the number to call:

7463#*CALL_ID*#*PIN*#@proxy.ideasip.com

*CALL_ID* is the number of your show. Let’s say it is 53082. *PIN *is
your pin number that you chose when you signed up. Let’s say it is
123456789. So you would enter the
string*7463#53082#123456789#@proxy.ideasip.com.* Why does that work? I
don’t know, honestly, it just does.”

Just to let you know, the reason that setup in IdeaSIP exists dates back
to a fellow named Randy Resnick (if you’re into Wine or Asterisk, you’re
bound to have run into him before) and the Wine Lovers’ Podcast on
TalkShoe. He signed up with IdeaSIP years ago and wanted to work out a
way to get people into his wine podcast via VoIP. We also sponsor his
Wine Podcast in a couple of countries with some IdeasIN numbers that
forward directly to the podcast when it’s active. The trick was getting
it all to work with TalkShoe.

In the beginning, that was easy. TalkShoe just had a single SIP userid
and you’d dial in, enter in your conference info by hand and voila –
you were in. Later on, they changed it to a unique SIP URI for each call
ID and you just had to enter your pin. Now, it all has to be encoded
using SIP headers. Each time, we’d go in and make the changes so that
Randy’s podcasts — now both the Wine Lovers’ podcast and the VoIP
Users’ Conference podcast — would work.

If you’re familiar with Asterisk, the way this works in Asterisk is
handled by this snippet of dial plan code:

; Talkshoe forwards
exten => _7463.,1,Answer
exten => _7463.,n,Set(TSSTRING=${EXTEN:5})
exten => _7463.,n,Set(TSPASSCODE=${CUT(TSSTRING,#,1)})
exten => _7463.,n,Set(TSPIN=${CUT(TSSTRING,#,2)})
exten =>
_7463.,n,SipAddHeader(Subject:${TSPASSCODE}${TSPIN})
exten => _7463.,n,Dial(SIP/123@talkshoe,30)

It’s somewhat ugly in order to handle the encoding from our Proxy server
through our Asterisk server and then on to Talkshoe. We could probably
have done it all in the proxy server, but to be honest, I’m not sure why
it wasn’t done that way. Still… it works, so we haven’t been in a rush
to ‘fix’ it, as it were.

This way, we could allow users to dial in directly or, as in the case of
the wine podcast, forward IdeasIN DIDs directly to a particular podcast.

So now you know why it all works the way it does.

Thanks again for mentioning us. We rely somewhat strictly on
word-of-mouth for our consumer customer IdeaSIP product, so it’s always
nice to see some exposure out there.

–
Neil Fusillo
CEO
Infinideas, inc.
http://www.ideasip.com