James Cridland @jamescridland@podcastindex.social
Editor of Podnews.
I've been involved in podcasting since January 2005, when I wrote the first RSS feed for Virgin Radio, and we became the first station to be podcasting daily.
Joined Sep 2020
Crossing fingers and hoping that the new server that's sending out the emails for Podnews in 14 minutes is going to work. Rather worried that the send for Sounds Profitable earlier this evening was much faster than I was expecting.
One for @adam - NRC (a fancy newspaper in the Netherlands) says it's concerned about major tech companies controlling podcasting. Their response? To, um, move their podcasts into their own app. Ze moeten wel gek zijn! https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/10/25/nrc-lanceert-nrc-audio-a4017313
Apparently podcasting needs government regulation. A long article that's concerned about Spotify, Amazon, Google and Apple's place in podcasting. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november-december-2020/big-tech-comes-for-podcasts/
Nothing to do with podcasts - kind of. But you know that Anchor/Spotify "shows with music"? Turns out that you can do quite a creditable version using the YouTube Javascript API - properly mixing and talking over the songs and jingles and all that. My recreational coding for today: https://playout.james.crid.land is a short try at that.
Worth a peek - https://github.com/saerdnaer/podcast-clients/blob/main/clients.json
Every podcast app out there, what they're capable of, and where to get them. In JSON format. Yikes.
Please don't hate me, but I've added a proposal for an attribution querystring for audio over here: https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/issues/86
It's probably the wrong place. But I'd love to get some feedback and suggestions for where to put this.
Particularly, one for @martin
Nobody probably cares about this either, but https://podnews.net/_pages/podcast-analytics/parse-analytics.php now has a full sample of what happens if you look at the RSS useragent vs the audio useragent when it comes to identifying sources. Both use the OPAWG list.
Slightly more people might care about this: Podnews's RSS feed now contains the <podcast:locked> and <podcast:transcript> tag. Thank you @tomrossi7 https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/main/docs/1.0.md
Nobody will care about this, but in case you do... here's a list of useragents out there in the wild. I dynamically produce my RSS feed with different tags for the audio for each client, so I can spot really quite well what app is using what useragent. https://podnews.net/article/sample-podcast-useragents
Has anyone implemented any of the new tags? @tomrossi7? Is it in a position where the ones that have been finalised can be added with the namespace declaration? Any examples?
Once the results of the upcoming RSS namespace are visible in Podcast Index, I intend to make Podnews use Podcast Index IDs as canonical, rather than Apple ones. As of now you'll see, right at the bottom, a Podcast Index ID in little text, as a debugging tool for my little brain. Like this https://podnews.net/podcast/1534780078 (don't worry, it's not a Luminary exclusive!)
Oops. So busy learning how Hugo works (for my personal site) that I forgot to actually press the send button. And it's another day with the Podcast Index as the lead story! https://podnews.net/update/new-rss-tags
@dave @adam Podcasting 2.0's RSS feed - https://mp3s.nashownotes.com/pc20rss.xml - refers to http://fcassets.curry.com.s3.wasabisys.com/enc/1601061162.894_pciavatar.jpg as the image. That returns an error: "The specified bucket does not exist".
@dave - I'm going to sling my HTML5 player into my own Github, and make it a bit more compatible with PodcastIndex. Am I right in thinking that an API call without any credentials will still work if executed in a browser which is logged-in to the PodcastIndex website API? That would enable me to have a completely working version of "play the latest episode", which is something I'd like to have.
I have also been reading up about silence skipping and dynamic compression, and both seem possible.
It's quite exciting that there's a spec for additional tags. More exciting that many people have been talking about this for years but have failed to spend the time to put up a straw man, as @dave has done. In a month we've seen more innovation in this space than the last ten years. Bravo to Dave and @adam .
James Cridland
boosted
To anyone proposing changes to the podcast namespace spec, please see @jamescridland issue he just filed:
https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/issues/5
It is specific, thorough and gives detailed examples of the exact changes being proposed.
If you propose changes please follow this model and it’ll make it easy for me to incorporate them.
Or just do a pull request. That’s always an option. :-)
@dave - while this doesn't use podcastindex (the podcast data is dynamically generated from PHP) there's no reason why it couldn't do that client-side. If of interest, you're welcome to add this to the podcastindex repo for a base, fully-featured HTML5 player for others to improve on?
Here's the code: https://podnews.net/podcast/player/209086
It's privacy-aware; and only makes two external calls - one to a Google font, the other to analytics, both of which can be removed. All the images are inline SVGs. It has an error-catch for when it can't play audio (including attempting to play HTTP audio in Chrome on an HTTPS page). It has a fancy loading animation and doesn't make any calls to the audio unless you press play.
The "rewind 30 seconds" button seems quite popular. The "download" button is too, but remember what type of people use Podnews. And finally, that Headliner button just isn't being used; it was nice integration but goodness, quite annoying to do in a privacy-conscious way.
Hope that's useful for the devs here building stuff.
/3
Editor of Podnews.
I've been involved in podcasting since January 2005, when I wrote the first RSS feed for Virgin Radio, and we became the first station to be podcasting daily.
Joined Sep 2020
