Samantha Henig (nytimes.com)It’s like a book club, but for on-demand audio.
Podcast listening can be harder to crack. There are so many shows! How do you find the ones you’ll like? And once you’ve found a show, where do you start: with the most recent episode? At the beginning? Some specific gem of an episode buried deep in the back catalog?
Perhaps the New York Times could simply start with making the RSS feeds for their podcasts easily discover-able?! Why are they hiding this simple piece of functionality? I just spent 20 minutes doing some reasonably serious web gymnastics to extract the RSS feed for Caliphate out of the iTunes feed using a JSON request tactic. Why can’t the podcast’s main page have or advertise the raw RSS feed?!
Corey Doctorow complained of this type of growing issue on the web recently in a short tweetstorm as well:
I really despair for people trying to figure out how to write the web today, given how obfuscated the referents to files on the web have become; for example, I’m about to fold a podcast that I appeared in to my own podcast feed
— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 14, 2018
How hard is it to add the following simple line to the header of their generally beautiful and functional Caliphate page?
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Caliphate" href="https://rss.art19.com/caliphate” />
They’ve got so many advanced resources, yet somehow they’re missing some of the simplest and best supported web technology that goes back more than a decade.
By the way, that link https://rss.art19.com/caliphate is the correct one for the RSS feed of the show by the way, in case others are searching for it.
If anyone needs a one-click button to subscribe to the series in their favorite feed reader, I’ve set up a SubToMe button on the follow post I made for the podcast.
@smokey @simonwoods I find that many larger podcasters are using third party platforms for hosting and distributing their podcasts. Many of these often use JavaScript trickery to hide the actual audio file of their episodes. Along with Cory Doctorow, I’ve complained about this before. There’s a link in there with a Cory tweetstorm that has some cluse for how to find mp3 files for podcasts using iTunes.
Others have recommended one of my favorite tools: Huffduffer. It’s got a couple useful bookmarklets that will help to find audio files as well as Ryan Barrett’s Huffduff-Video bookmarklet.
Another service I like is Listen Notes, which has a podcast search functionality and will point you directly to RSS feeds which will also uncover audio files a bit more easily.
I found many of these to help create faux-casts on my own website of things I’ve listened to.