As usual, my favorite mode for discovering internet nuggets (c.f. bag of gold) are ones I was not looking for and pretty much stumble into while doing something else. Thus it was I found On Demand Smart Links, which honestly sounds like a buzzword. I deduce this was previously called Song.Link (yup, redirect) as a way to reference music.
Stay with me.
The stumble happened in some random Mastodon link, which was a reference likely during American Thanksgiving to someone relishing a listen of Alice’s Restaurant, via this link https://song.link/i/41229186
I am betting/hoping a curious reader clicked the link. You get an image of an album cover, links but icons to streaming music services where you can listen, stores where you can buy, and if available, an embedded YouTube of the song. It’s not all stellar at first, there’s tons of music listing services.
But its nice you have a share link, like I used, but as well, an option to embed (with small, medium, large versions plus light/dark flavors, which I can do, because this is my blog damnit.
If I am guessing right, the “smart link” part is that it is able to fetch likely through APIs, all the playing services you can listen to a song. It seems like a handy way to reference music (I am not quite sure what the customizing option does I have not gone that far).
It was slashing the URL to the root domain that landed me on the main service (song.link redirects to odesli.co)
And thus, you can do something for albums too, start typing in say the album I got hooked on in high school that opened the door to be my favorite band. So you also have a nifty way to reference albums (seems odd that songs are not tied to albums, but who am I to criticize).
But now I see podcasts, hmmm. I have a few. What does it do for the OEG Voices Podcast I do for OEGlobal? It finds it as I type in, my obscure podcast, heck another embed for the same reason:
I already have the small embed added to the bottom right footer pane of the site. It’s a nice way to show different services it is listed (though I am pretty sure I only registered it on Apple, Spotify and Google, but it somehow gets picked up on a few more.
And now even farther down the obscure end, it can even find the podcast I did a few years ago with Antonio Vantaggiato, we’ve not done an episode for three years! Both these podcasts use the WordPress PowerPress plugin, which lists them with some of the services that ODSL is finding.
Ahhh podcasts, read the sad tales of implosions? I am so far from the league that would garner contracts in 10s of millions of dollars, and the fact that so much money is mixed in just smells foul to me.
I’m more than happy to power my own podcast sites in WordPress, which provides everything you need (an RSS feed) built in, yes, I have pushed mine out to a few spaces, but I always prefer making their main host location something I manage. Podcasting, Schmodcasting…
Yet I run astray from my blog post topic, that’s allowed here. I don’t know how much use On Demand Smart Links, odelsi.co has, but I found the service interesting. Filed away.
Update (before this post even published)
I stepped away from the blog window, and then played a bit with Odelsi– created an account, and made a new custom podcast link for OEG Voices. I was able to add more information, relevant links, even create a custom URL: https://pods.link/oeg-voices
Featured Image: Mine, again!
