A timely idea arrives from several directions. Podcasts I listen to.

I listen to podcast pretty exclusively when commuting. I am in the car nearly a couple of hours a day. I seldom listen elsewhere. If I am on foot I prefer to listen to what is around me. At home I listen to music when cooking.

Here are some regulars.

The BBC

I wish the BBC and everyone else made it simpler to find RSS feeds.

Tech

  • I listen to Core Init, by Manton and Daniel it is aimed at Mac developers, but often strays onto blogging, AI and other interesting topics.
  • More Mac: ATP & The Talk Show, I don’t listen to all of the episodes but catch up with one occasionally.
  • WordPress briefing. Seems to have dried up as the host moved out of a role at WordPress.

Other

Recent additions

Huffduffer

I like to listen to odd episodes of podcasts without subscribing. Huffduffer created a RSS feed from audio on webpages. I mourn the passing of Huffduffer-video which let you add YouTube and other media to your huffduff feed as audio. Using the huffduffer bookmarklet is interesting. Increasingly some podcast hide links to audio files. This leads to some tedious workarounds. (Find the rss link, open that in Firefox and copy the episode audio url).

John Johnston on Huffduffer is what I’ve huffduffed.

Castro Sideloads

The app I use to listen to podcasts has a few nice features. You can just drop an mp3 into an iCloud folder and it appears in the app. Better still you can use an app extension to get audio from a webpage or rip a YouTube to audio. I hope that it will replace huffduff-video for me for video.

For what it is worth here in my Castro opml export and some of them as html. The html has links to the site and RSS1.

Many of the feeds in my opml are no longer being updated. Some I subscribed to long after they existed. Castros’s triage system, allowing you to build a play order from feeds is very handy for this.

  1. My horrible combination of google sheets and bash didn’t manage to convert them all. Castro’s opml export didn’t have links to the sites, just the RSS. ↩︎

Feedland went public today. I’ve been lucky enough to have been testing it and following its development for the last few weeks.

Feedland is a lot of things, all to do with RSS feeds. First it is a place to gather and organise feeds. Second it can be a place to read these feeds. Third it allows you to publish a ‘news product’ which you can share so that others can read the news from sets of these gathered feeds. Fourthly it is a place were you can see what feeds other users have gathered.

Feedland was built by Dave Winer who

pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software;
So it has an interesting pedigree and is opinionated software. Dave has had as long a relationship with RSS and OPML as anyone on the web and in an excellent position to have opinions.

Feedland is developed with an eye to interop. Feeds to get information out abound. For example the widget on my sidebar uses the Sync OPML to Blogroll plugin to sync my blog role from the opml list of feeds I’ve subscribed to in Feedland. I could also use this to control the feeds I view in an rss reader like inoreader which supports external opml.

Dave says:

FeedLand is all about people, feeds and news.

One of the most attractive, to me features, is the possibility of communities being loosely organised around the sharing of feeds. It is easy to see the feeds another user has gathered and to add them to your own list with a handy checkbox.

Feedland is still developing. I’d recommend a look at the docs and there are some interesting views starting to appear for the early adopters.

I’ve only touched on a few to the things about Feedland I’ve found interesting so far. There is a lot more to this app already and lots more to come.