Feed Experiment

I’m experimenting with an idea I’ve had for a while, and that idea is to attach audio files to blog posts.

You might know this concept as “a podcast.” But in my case, it’s just “my standard RSS feed with enclosures added.”

A podcast is nothing but an RSS feed, if you weren’t aware. A blog is also an RSS feed, if you enable it. So it seems logical to smoosh the two things together.

Not surprisingly, I’m the first person to ever think of this on the entire Internet, because some Googling reveals that nobody has ever asked for this capability of taking two separate workstreams and turning them into one. So I had to consult the podcast specs and write all the code myself.

But it wasn’t hard. I just added an <enclosure> tag to my RSS feed which points to an mp3 file. Then I added some metadata to the post’s Markdown text, which refers to said mp3 file, and presto: The blog’s RSS feed is a podcast.

So, you should be able to add https://endgameviable.com/index.xml to any software that will play podcasts. You might be surprised what happens.

The hard part, of course, is creating and hosting the mp3 file. But that’s a problem for another day.

Incidentally, you can add any blog’s RSS feed to a podcatcher, depending on the software. It’s just that it might not play anything unless there are audio or video files attached.

You might also notice an experimental little doodad at the top of each blog post now with a “play” button on it, if you’re using an HTML5-aware browser.

Image: Wikimedia Commons