One More Thing on Podcast Listening (well maybe two) (or three)

In the spirit of Groomian #BlogOrDie, rather than just append some more ideas to my recent post on podcast listening, why not just blog anew? No rules here except the ones I concoct.

Left Of My List

I only realized yesterday when I drove for errands, and as usual, flipped on the Overcast player to see a new episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. My good friend and walking, talking music encyclopedia Gardner Campbell (has blog, needs more posts!) kept urging me to listen. The episodes are looong, and it took a few listens to get hooked. The depth and breadth of host Andrew Hickey’s research is dizzying, often going back a hundred years for a song’s root, or weaving in rock culture and social history. I think it was the All Along the Watchtower episode that got me hooked. And now, looking to see how a Beach Boys song needs to go back to the 1830s, Amerian racism, and somewhere folds in Charles Manson.

500 songs is definitely in my upper queue, thanks Gardo!

The Ugh of Self Promoting Podcast Intros

I have to say it’s been enjoyable to see a few more people respond in blog mode, and seeing a gentle spill out of followup posts. I so appreciated Tim Klapdor’s listening list especially since most were new to me.

No offense, Tim, I liked the concept of The Dollop, but the first one I tried had clocked in over nine minutes before the show got started. I waded through what kind of felt like those old FM radio drive time talk shows:

• Teasing of personal habits
• A run down of upcoming show stops
• A long read ad for a mattress store
• Urgings to subscribe to YouTube channels
• Another list of show tours

I have issues with podcast shows that front load this much stuff. I was turned off before the “real” stuff started.

That’s the beauty of the classic format of This American Life, the opening short story that hooks you into the theme right away with a 1-2 segment.

Maybe I am not hip enough for the Dollop or need to come back later.

Better Sharing of Lists

It’s interesting that since podcasts are powered by the almighty RSS that what we all have done in these posts, which is good, is to list shows we like and why. But if I want to add anyone’s list or a few shows, I have to open my app, do some searching, and finally subscribe.

That’s why the part of my post that I really was writing about was not my own lists of listens but what I had been discovering poking around in the massive and open API enabled Podcast Index where you can search and find almost any podcast, but also it’s connection via a click to a show’s entry in Episodes.fm that make it so darn easy to add to your preferred podcast player.

A tool thought / idea to quickly find and subscribe to a podcast is a venerable web browser bookmarklet tool. Something that would give me a box to type the name of a show or to use highlighted text from a web page to do a search. Unfortunately, I cant find a way to trigger searches on Episodes.fm since it’s all React mumbo, but the URLs for Podcast Index are very workable. When I search for “500 Songs” the URL that spits results is

https://podcastindex.org/search?q=500%20songs&type=all

That is drop easy for a bookmarklet, I have a fleet of them that work this way. So in 2 minutes sans ChatGPT, I got a Podcast Finder (just drag link to your browser bookmarks bar). If you just click it, you can type in the search terms, say the show “Hard Fork” Tim lists and run the search on Podcast Index, where I can find the show I want from the results, and listen/sample the show, or get an RSS feed or better yet, use the Episodes.fm link to add to my preferred player.

Or even better, while reading Tim’s list, I can just highlight his text for Tech Won’t Save Us, click the bookmarklet, and let it run on that.

But truly, sharing a set of podcast feeds should be easy. Since they are just RSS feeds, a collection ought to be built as an OPML file. The problem is, I am not sure how many podcast players can use OPML to import a set of podcast feeds to add. It should be easy?

Stephen Downes does point out that the Android app AntennaPod does support import/export of sets of feeds as OPML, and shares a nifty example from some guy named “Ed” who shares his listens as an OPML file rendered readable on the web using the “lost art” (Stephen’s accurate description) of an XSL Stylesheet. The link lists links to all show’s web sites and RSS feeds.

Ed must be of merit, as I can see he lists A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs!

All this blathering is to say that the blog sharing of lists is fun and please, carry on the blog chain post, but I wanted to think again more about lists as data, and ways to leverage that through Podcast Index and Episodes.fm.

Updates Dec 20, 2024

I was inspired last night to try Ed’s OPML styled display list of his subscription feeds. I downloaded his style sheet. And I found out (as noted below in the Mastodon comments) that I can export my podcast feeds as OPML in Overcast – there is an export button under the account info. So I copied Ed’s OPML and just swapped my feed data list for his. Also note you should download his RSS icon.

But it failed to render nice, I just got raw OPML. I checked my cpanel entries for MIME types and saw listings for opml and xsl files. In desperation I found Ed’s email (he is Ed Summers) and asked him. In about 15 minutes he replied with the answer.

I think you will want to make sure your server serves up the .opml with:

    Content-Type: application/xml

instead of:

    Content-Type: text/x-opml

In my Reclaim Hosting cpanel there is a panel for MIME Types under “Advanced”- I just added my own custom entry as described, and BOOM! My podcast subscriptions are displayed at https://cogdogblog.com/stuff/podcasts/cogdog.opml

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Featured Image: My photo, I found quite easily in my own flickr stream of 70000+ public domain photos. I thought about this post as “returning” to the previous one, and that search worked because this photo is part of a set called Marvin’s Return (I forget this, its a whole photo story thing!). And yes, silly as it seems, and while I do not legally have to, I am attributing myself. I’m Going Home…. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license.