A short review of the Huffduffer podcast feed service

Recently, I posted some ideas about podcast subscription lists/listening lists, and one of my readers (John Johnston) suggested I look at the Huffduffer podcast feed service. I found out that I already had an account – amazing! Must have forgotten!

I tried it this evening. After I logged in, I clicked on the “Huffduff it!” button at the top of the page. This took me to another page which had text boxes for the audio URL, title, description, and tags. I filled in the fields and saw a file added to the previous file that I had “huffduffed”. I then took the feed URL, and was able to subscribe to it to PocketCasts, and to listen to one of the files. Bing!

This service provides the basic functionality of creating a feed from audio files, and also hosts the feed, so the user does not have to provide any hosting. Nice! In the next few days, I will review some other services that I discovered after Huffduffer. Many thanks to John Johnston for mentioning the Huffduffer service.

In The Car Podcast – January 12, 2025

I recorded this on 1/12/2025, so I am using that in the title, even though I am posting it several days later.

Links to topics in the podcast:

The sentencing of Donald Trump

Today, Donald Trump was sentenced for his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.

Coverage: (CNN – Takeaways) (CNN – live blog) (CNN – audio of hearing) (MSNBC – audio of hearing) (USA Today – article and downloadble audio) (CBS – audio excerpts from hearing).

I listened to the USA Today audio (download), it was a little clearer than the audio file provided by the NY State Unified Court System (download). I am providing the USA Today audio download in a player at the end of this post.

Here are my notes of the hearing:

Counsel introductions (People and Defense)
Both sides are reviewing the probation report, neither side had anything to add to the record
Clerk informed People and Defense that they could make statements before sentencing
People/Josh Steinglass
- People recommend unconditional discharge
- Reviewed how Trump showed no remorse and threatened to retaliate against prosecutors in this case
- Jury reached a unanimous verdict
- Probation report says defendant sees himself as “above the law”
- Must be mindful of the office of the presidency
Todd Blanche
- Disagrees with what the government just said
- Case should not have been brought
- We will seek an appeal
Donald Trump
- Very terrible experience
- Political witch hunt
- Lots of complaints
- DOJ is very involved
- I won the election
- This is a weaponization of government
- I was treated very unfairly
Juan Merchan
- Wishes to explain reasoning for sentencing decision
- A judge must decide what is correct sentence
- Court must consider the facts of the case and any other mitigating circumstances
- Extraordinary circumstances involved in this case
- One power that the presidency does not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict
- Pronounced sentence of unconditional discharge

Court Documents

Musing about podcast subscription/listening lists

What is a podcast subscription/listening list? Well, let’s start with talking about subscription lists. For most, if not all podcast clients, OPML files containing a list of the podcast feeds being monitored have been the defacto standard for import/export of podcast feed lists. Prior to use in podcast clients, OPML files have been used as a defacto standard for import/export of feed lists for feed aggregator apps.

As far back as 2012, Dave Winer was pushing for the use of OPML subscription lists within podcast apps. In this context, he wanted podcast apps to be able to subscribe to an OPML file with a URL, so that people could automatically get any updates to the OPML, and subsequently, anything new would be added to their podcast app.

In the fall of 2024, Dave Winer brought up this idea several times and later created a page describing this idea in more detail, and calling it “listening lists”. Dave Winer created a Github issue to collect feedback on this idea, and Dom Christie suggested the following:

I have been wondering if the episodes from curated lists could be published in their own RSS feed? That way, users (and not just podcasters) could created their own feeds, listenable in any app.

That same day, Dave Winer linked to a page describing a RSS feed made up of first episodes of fiction podcasts. An overview page lists the podcast episodes and also provides audio players for them – neat! From the looks of it, this is a made-by-hand page, although there could be some tool or tooling involved.

This suggests several ideas to me:

App to create a podcast feed which merges a list of other podcast feeds
App to allow users to create a podcast feed of podcast episodes that they select (it could include the ability to host the created feed)

I did some experiments over the holidays with Dave Winer’s RSS NPM module to create a podcast feed of some audio files that were not organized as a podcast. However, the experiment shows how this type of feed can be created. I am going to start working on this concept. If anyone reading this is interested in collaborating, let me know!

The end of podcasting, chapter 64

My last post in this series was in April 2024, so I have not touched this topic in a while (although I have been writing about podcasting and some issues with WordPress podcast feeds). However, in the November 2024 issue of New York magazine, an article called “How YouTube Ate Podcasting” appeared, which sounds ominous, so let’s check it out…

The pull-quotes seems to be that podcasting is moving from audio to video:

A lot has changed for podcasting in two decades, but one shift is both underrecognized and obvious: It’s not really an audio medium anymore….YouTube, typically known as the go-to platform for video content, has risen to the top as the most popular service used for podcast listening in the U.S….The trend is more pronounced among younger listeners, Edison says, citing research from earlier this year, which found that “84 percent of Gen Z monthly podcast listeners … listen to or watch podcasts with a video component.”

So – younger “podcast listeners” are “watching” more “podcasts” instead of “listening” to “podcasts”. I am using “podcasts” in quotes here, because the podcasts in question are YouTube videos. However, they are discoverable in podcast apps like PocketCasts, and there are tutorials for how to construct a RSS feed URL for a YouTube channel.

Maybe part of the problem is in the creation part, says Chuck Shotton (via Dave Winer):

Posting a video to Youtube is infinitely easier for a lot of people than understanding how to publish a podcast. That’s really the gist of it. Any dingdong with a phone camera can be a YouTube star.

So, yes, recording a video and posting it to YouTube is a skill that many people have nowadays -but is that “eating podcasting”? Is that keeping people from creating new audio podcasts? No (using WordPress is pretty simple). Is that preventing people from listening to audio podcasts in the way that they have been? No. Is it providing an easier way for people to monetize their “podcasts” using the tools that YouTube has set up? Ah, now I think we are getting closer to the nut of “How YouTube Ate Podcasting” (see “Money makes the world go ’round“). People who want to make money from podcasts definitely could be moving to YouTube to do this, as well as other services (see chapters 57, 58, and 59). However, I think the thing to do is to make great things and find ways to innovate. Let’s get out there and compete people – come on!

Followup on creating WordPress podcast feeds

In November 2024, I wrote a post about an issue I discovered in trying to create a WordPress category feed for a set of audio posts. The category feed had issues in being recognized by a podcast app. I found that when I set the post type/format as “Audio” in the WordPress editor, the category feed could be recognized by a podcast app.

Last month, I noticed a tweet by Ken Smith that some WordPress themes do not have the support in the editor interface for the post type/format. He linked to a video (shown at the end of this post) showing how to modify WordPress files to add this feature to a theme if not present. I checked some of my older WordPress websites, and found that several of them had this issue. I appreciate Ken bringing this to a wider attention.

Experimenting with manually creating podcast feeds

Earlier this year, Dave Winer began an experiment to create a podcast feed with shownotes for the Morning Coffee Notes podcasts that he created at the beginnings of podcasting in 2004. He created a Node.js app (podcastBuilder) to create the feed and the shownotes, which were in an OPML outline (both data for the feed and the shownotes). The feed is available through Apple Podcasts and, of course, Scripting News.

I was interested in trying this out, but I did not want to fire up the Drummer outliner app to create an OPML file for this app. I then remembered that Dave Winer had another Node package (rss) to create RSS feeds based on JSON data input. After some experimentation, I was able to add elements to the rss package example to create a feed with enclosures and other podcast information like the podcastBuilder app was creating. My manually created feed is hosted here, and three people have managed to load this in a podcast app and listen to the files (audio from Ken Smith’s essays for Michiana Chronicles). If you would like to try it, I have created a Github repo with the Javascript file I used for creating the feed, the output feed from the app, and some simple instructions. Enjoy!

Tip for creating a WordPress podcast feed

I have written before about using WordPress to host podcast files, but I have had problems in getting a stock WordPress site to create a feed that loads in a podcast client (like PocketCasts). I decided to look into this yesterday, and figured out that the post format has to be “Audio” (if it is “Standard”, even though the enclosure appears in the feed, the feed will not be recognized in PocketCasts).

I then updated all the posts I have with podcast files to be “Audio”, and created a new category (“In The Car Podcast”), and added that to all the posts. I then was able to create a feed (https://andysylvester.com/category/in-the-car-podcast/feed/), and was able to load that feed in PocketCasts – hooray!

In The Car Podcast – November 23, 2024

I recorded this on 11/23/2024, so I am using that in the title, even though I am posting it 2 days later. Coves the election, what to do next, and what technical projects I think I will work on next.

Links referenced in the podcast:

Emptywheel: What next?

Emptywheel: Lessons from Red States on How to Push Back

Oregon Public Broadcasting: Responding to residents proved foundational in Gluesenkamp Perez victory as district picked Trump

CNN: Gallego offers advice to Democrats after winning in state Trump won

The East Is A Podcast: I was referencing this episode

Datasette: Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

Federated Wiki: Main Github repo