👓 How to Join Our Podcast Club | New York Times

Read How to Join Our Podcast Club by Samantha Henig (nytimes.com)

It’s like a book club, but for on-demand audio.

This ironic quote from the piece sticks out to me:

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?

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 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.