Techtalk — coding for directory support

Warning! Heavy geek talk that many of you will not care about contained in this post…

We’ve done a litle re-deployment to come of our code to make things a bit more palatable for some podcasting directories. To be specific, we changed our default RSS feed generation code so that it’ kicks out a consistent <pubDate>. We do some funky stuff with <pubDate>s for two reasons:

  1. Personal: Our custom feeds are more about when you — the listener — are set to retrieve the next episode of a chapter, rather than when the episode was originally released by the author.

  2. Relevant: Podcast versions of audiobooks do not go stale like standard podcasts. In fact, there are a lot of other sorts of “timeless” content in the podosphere that get shafted when all the attention is on “new episodes”.

So while we didn’t compromise on the first issue, we did give ground on the second. Starting at the next refresh cycle, directories such as the Podcast.com, Podcast Pickle and others will now see all of our “default” feeds age. The upside is that our default feeds won’t draw the ire of directory developers and will now “behave” properly. The downside is that some of our content will now show as not updated in almost two years on directories. I already know of one directory that removes “stale” content1, so it’s only a matter of time before some well meaning directory admin deletes one of our books because it looks like it’s podfaded, when in actually it was just complete.

Pity, but I’m not sure what else we can do about it. I still think we need a universally accepted “completed” flag in the podosphere to designate content that should not expire, but we’re a niche within a niche and I’m not holding my breath.

At any rate, take a look at how our feeds appear in your directory of choice and keep me posted if anything funny happens.

1 - To my knowledge, no Podiobooks.com content was listed in this directory





This entry was posted by Evo on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Techtalk — coding for directory support”

  1. Anemone Says:
    November 19th, 2007 at 4:35 pm

    Podiobooks.com is my directory for web audiobooks. So, this won’t affect me unless you guys start deleting them from this end. Which I doubt …

    Anemone

  2. Christian Tiberg Says:
    November 20th, 2007 at 7:52 am

    I agree with Anemone - if it isn’t listed here it isn’t a podcast book, and I won’t find it, unless I hear a promo in another podcast…

    It’s hard to solve this problem, though - your chances of getting a flag through aren’t huge :)

    I’ve tried to get things through the directory structure myself, and haven’t had much luck - although my idea would benefit most everyone if implemented across the board :(

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