New Syntax Website Brainstorm! IRL!

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Bos.

Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats rid. There today. We've got a very fun one for you because Scott is literally sitting across the desk from me right now. Hi, Scott. Hey. What's going on? Rid. So, Scott has some business to do here in in Toronto. Scott and I have some business to do here in Toronto. And, we thought, rid Like, why don't you come over for a day? And, well, last night, we had a little syntax meetup, which was really cool. We had, like, a day's notice on a Tuesday night, And we had, like, 15 people,

come on out to to a a bar here in Hamilton. It was super fun to meet everybody. Yeah. A lot of Lot of amazing people showed up. It was a great time. Yeah. It's super super good. Especially for, like you said, short notice, the weather wasn't great either. So, yeah, shout out to everybody who came out. Yeah. That was Super fun. And then it's also your birthday today, so happy birthday. Hey. Yeah. Turning 37, getting it going.

Feeling some some way about it, Let you know that's how it is. Yeah.

We're sponsored today by Sentry. Sentry is the error exception rich. Performance, replay, cron monitoring, amazing company that, figures out what's going wrong with your application. So you you put Sentry into your rid Front end, you can put it in your back end. They support literally every language out there. And, also, like, every framework, almost, they have an integration. They have an integration for Remix. The other day, I was rid Building a Remix website. And I was like, oh, I wonder if there's a Remix specific implementation rather than just a a React one or just a JavaScript one, and they do. They make it easy for all that type of stuff. So you're gonna wanna throw this into your application at century.io.

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Rid We're in person. We should do something that's kinda interesting here. So we thought, let's talk about our hopes and dreams and brainstorming for a new syntax website rid Because there is a lot that could be added to the syntax website. I think there's there's a lot that could be, rid May make the show better in terms of, like, providing supplementary info and and searchability and transcripts all that. So we're we're gonna kinda go through the different areas of the website that we'd like to improve and just talk about, like, what would be Wicked as a, rid a stand alone podcast website. Because, like, I I don't know. Have you ever seen, like, a really good podcast website? I I don't I don't think I have. I've been thinking about this. As a single podcast,

No. Because everybody's using another service or something. Right? Yeah. But I I thought about, put my brain a lot on, like, Even podcast networks and other companies that are doing this well. I'm like, what are those things? But at the end of the day, I think there's I think we're uniquely positioned to be able to both Think about what are these idealistic ways that this experience could be and then execute on it. Mhmm. Because most normal podcasters are gonna be like, oh, I'd rid. Love to have this. And if the service they're subscribing to doesn't support it, they're pooched. They don't they don't have that opportunity. So I think we we're uniquely positioned, and rid. This is actually really fun to give people some insight. Wes and I have not talked a ton about this before, Hans, so we're this is gonna be a true kind of rid. Brainstorming session in that sort of way, where we both probably had this on our brains for a bit, and now we get to dump all of that out. Yeah.

Rid alright. So let's get into the first thing, which is the home page design. It's kinda funny that the syntax home page was rid. We built it in, like, a couple days, 5 years ago, and, the number of podcasts has grown to almost rid. 600 now, and that is we we don't have any pagination or anything like that. It's simply just a long scrolling list of rid Podcast, which is okay because there is, like, a position sticky, and it's kinda nice that you can just search the whole page without without doing anything. But it would be nice to rid Probably paginate those. I don't know if infinite scrolling would make a whole lot of sense, but, I think a lot of the the stuff we'll talk about in just a sec, which is, like, Surfacing good older content will probably solve those as well. Yeah. And I think that will be part of the challenge. Right? Because we do just have a giant list of nearly 600 episodes,

And that has pros and cons, but when you move away from that big old list, you're going to lose the command f ability or things like That's you're gonna have to replace those experiences with better ones, not worse ones, which too oftentimes I think, Especially websites that do do that type of thing can replace those experiences with worse ones. When you do command f and some Native find experience comes up, and it's not nearly as good as Yeah. Just giving you the quick, yeah, the quick find or anything like that. So as long as we we can make that happen. And And I I do wanna say, Wes, that you said that this thing just, like, popped up. And, sincerely, we talked about making the podcast, and it was, like, almost like Overnight, you had the logo and the website, and you're just like, here it is. And I was just, like, shocked at how how fast you put this together initially. Yeah. Because we just, like,

rid. We just banged banged it up, and, like, we're like, let's go. You know? Like, we had a couple recorded, and and it kinda needed to go out. And, obviously, we've we've added features and and fixed stuff over the years, but, rid it's primarily still the same Next. Js application that it was many, many moons ago.

And it it served us pretty well. And rid It's kinda cool because it's open source. So we've had people contribute, like, somebody contributed scrubbing On the player a while back, which is really nice, someone contributed, like when you you hover over top of over the player, it will tell you, like, where you're scrubbing to, like, 6 minutes and 80 seconds. Which buttons are you talking about? The, like, the Spotify button. Oh, that was me. You added that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because those weren't there originally. They were. Or rid I mean, some of them aren't. No. The the since Spotify was not a thing when we started, which is kinda interesting, that's why it's at the end of the and, like, I'm looking at it now. Like, rid Does anybody use Stitcher anymore? You know? And, like, we can tell from our stats that not a lot of people use Itunes anymore to listen to podcasts.

Rid. Overcast is definitely still up there, but Spotify is is definitely taking over the the podcast scene. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. The potluck question

rid But we we added the links to, you know, learning about sponsorship and those types of things.

Even initially, it was just like, Just a big old listing, but, hey, you know, everything that has added to it has been useful. Totally. I would I would love to get that, like, potluck

rid off of Google forms. Whenever you get a Google form, you're like, a Google form is like a failure of the system in that rid Somebody had to go around their infrastructure just to get something done. Like, Google Form is great for that, but I feel like we should be able to we're developers. We can and that's kind of exciting thing about this is we can literally make anything we want. Yeah. Yeah. And we could make it look and and feel like how we want, which is a big deal if we're not, You know, to hold on to the whims of our our host for this.

User features.

This is actually somebody made a syntax, Chrome extension, which will log which ones you have listened to. So it would be nice to have some sort of login or some local probably login would be good because Local storage, you would lose that, but it would be nice to log which ones you have listened to and which ones you haven't because then you can go like, essentially, like, Ideally, the new website could be an app. Yeah. People do listen to the podcast Oh, yeah. On the website. Bit. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I I know. I do I personally I always go to, you know, Pocket Cast myself, but, yeah, I it is this is definitely a thing, and it could be like you said, it could be an app. In in that way, people could just have everything that they would possibly want there. And if we're talking login, you know, I think about this all the time. How how would you You handle the login given, you know, freedom to do in any way. Would you just have email based? Would you have MagicLink based? Would you have rid. GitHub login, like, in your ideal circumstance, what how would you have login? Because that's a it's a big rid Question. Yeah. I probably wouldn't do

any OAuth stuff like that because it's such a pain to get into. And, like, I I don't know. I every time I log in with GitHub, I like it for, like, my hosting provider. But every time I I do it with other ones, I'm like, we should really be rid Log in with I know that it's locked down, and they only get my email. I don't know. Maybe the listener would would would tell us. What do you think? Should it be logged in to GitHub? I don't know. Yeah. I I'm I'm I have a lot of thoughts about that as well. Like, me, personally, given the opportunity, I always choose

to log in with my email and a password for any given site. Yeah. Because that just kind of, like, locks it away, but that's also because I use 1 password. If I didn't use 1 password, I probably wouldn't feel that way. I'd probably be annoyed that I had to enter a password for this website. I like the the magic link,

rid along with username and password. And I get annoyed when you log in and it has to email you a code rid Because, like, it takes I don't know. Like, it takes a second to email it, and then you gotta wait for your like, I use Missive on the desktop, and it only refreshes every, 10 seconds or so. So you gotta sit there and wait, and it's, like, some it's half a minute to log in where it's, like Context switching. Yeah. I just wanna know. Quick. Folks like us, we've we've already moved on to something else. Yeah.

So I don't know. Something something would be interesting there rid to to log what people are listening to and to for people to be able to track it. Like, this is what I do with my own course platform. So you could you could certainly do something similar to that.

Rid Search would be really cool.

Right now, we don't really have no. We don't have search at all. There was an effort early on to implement Algolia, And I think that would probably be worth revisiting once we do this type of thing. But I think even breaking it up a little bit further, which is not just searching The show notes, because that's what I do. Everyone says, what was the episode you talked about x, y, and z on? And what I do is I just go to Google. I type in what I think we talked about, And then I I do site colon syntax.fm, and I find and, that's fine because I know exactly, like, the words that would have been used In that one, I can usually find it and and send the person the link. But, a really good search would be nice for people to define rather than just text based search. Right? Like, if you you spell 1 word wrong,

it's you can't find it. Yeah. I've I've been thinking a lot about search. You know, the rid. SvelteKit docs have really great search, and I did some research into what they were doing. And there is, like, a Open source thing that they're using for search. I'm trying to find it right now, but and it's it's really good. So I'm wondering if, like, that's the type of thing that's the type of route we go where it does kinda feel like that same type of Algolia experience, but you're not, You know, you're not with the service. The, docs from

Vite have really good search. What do I wonder if they use the same thing, flex rid Search. No. They're using Algolia. Okay. There was another one that was using, like, a, like, a open source. It looked like Algolia, but it was like its its own thing. Yeah. Here here's this one. It's flex search.

It is next generation full text search for browser and Node. Js, and this is what the SvelteKit site's using. In in my experience, it's really good. And is that

rid You can index things. For some reason, I thought it was just, like, only static. And there's contextual

search.

There's there's some interesting stuff here. So where does the data get stored

rid. When the index is the the value done any research into beyond just looking at the,

the GitHub page. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be that'd be cool to to dip into because I I also think that it could be taken a step further, and you could rid Somehow parse the show notes into links, guests, topics. Like, there's there's many rid pieces of data that are associated with it. Right? And if someone wants to say, like, I'm looking for a sick pick that was the egg thing. You know? Then they could they could just do a quick search or, like, Who was talking about

converting web components to React? You know? Like, that'd be so nice to be able to surface that stuff a lot easier. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. And that even gets into, like, things like filtering within your search too. Right? Like, are you searching by what? And, you know, am I am I Filtering, am I trying to find a specific guest, a specific time line, a specific topic? Give me all of the shows Mhmm. On React From the last year. You know? And and type of show as well, like a a hasty, a tastier, a guest,

or, like, some sort of, like, special, like a live one. Because sometimes people are like, okay. Well, I've got I got 15 minutes right now. I wanna listen to a syntax. What could I listen to? Yeah. Give me every every episode that's under 20 minutes long. That'd be really cool. Or you could, like oh, maybe, like, even, like, a playlist. Like, you could add things to your playlist if you're signed in. Rid because I'm thinking, like, if we have, like, an app per se, like, if we wrap it in something, then you could store a list of, rid I guess this is work from the browser as well because you can play an m p 3 from the browser and then close the browser,

and the m p 3 keeps playing. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot there. You You know who has really great searches or at least great filtering? They don't have great search. A great filtering is Peloton has really great filtering.

I think about that all the time. Like, when I'm using an app and I I come across either, like, a really nice filtering or a really nice search, I'm I'm either I don't know if you do this, but I'm I'm always taking screenshots of apps on my phone when I'm using them. Like, oh, this is so good. Let me take a screenshot. Like, I'm gonna look at it later or something.

Rid It's like and they just end up in my my photos. I never ever look at them again. Next one we have here is transcripts. So this is actually something I took a stab at,

rid Like, I don't know, maybe a year and a half ago, I reverse engineered the Otter dotai API because they didn't rid have an API available to you. And if we were gonna do this type of thing, it would have to be automated. So I'd like I basically just reverse engineered their API for the browser based UI, rid and it it worked pretty good. And I think since then, transcribing audio into text has gotten rid Way even better than that. It's to a point where it's just, like, super good. So I think having transcripts on the rid The show would be really cool. And then also, like, I even went as far as, like, as the syntax audio player was playing, I was, like, highlighting The time stamp in the transcript as we were going through and because because you can match up the transcripts, have, Like, I don't know, from 6 seconds to 8 seconds. You know? So it'd be kinda cool to show that type of thing. I saw something the other day that says, like, rid 68% of Gen Zs

watch TV with the captions on. I do. BlueJeans on Gen Z, and I do. Yeah. Yeah. We always have it on, Especially because well, it was much more important when the kids were younger, and we didn't wanna wake up our kids. Oh, yeah. So we'd have the TV on a little bit quieter And then just have the captions on some you know, we kinda just leave them on now just because, it it reinforces

rid Kind of what you're hearing while you're reading it. Yeah. My daughter always wants them on too. She every time we're watching a show or a movie, she puts them on, and she she's, rid Like, grade 2. I she's just learning to read, but she she likes having on. So maybe we need that Yeah. Part of the design as well. Yeah. Rid. I don't know if you've you've dove into Whisper at all the the OpenAI.

Yeah. I I've looked at it. So Automatic speak recognition. Yeah. So is that Open no. That's from OpenAI. It's from OpenAI. Yeah. Open source company.

I don't know why they have open in their name.

Open source AI, not open source. Rid It'd be fun if that's what it was. Yeah. I I don't know. I've thought about this a lot too.

You know, it's definitely been a fault of the website for a long time. So something we're looking to to quickly correct in the new site and have it be not just existing because, you know, the easiest thing would just be to have Transcript's existing, but I think we wanna have it be

a next level experience. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's it's easy just to, like, Dump it on there and be like, there. I did it. You know? There's your transcript. Yeah. But, like, I think, like, you could you can, like, elevate it. There's something there. I'm curious. Like, what does that What does that cost? I'd like, the price of this stuff has just come coming down, down, down as well. I'm curious what the OpenAI Whisperer is. Rid Yeah. There there's gotta be, like, open source, things in it as well. Yeah. You know what I learned the other day? You know FFmpeg? Yes. Shout out to Andy on TikTok. I'll I'll find it. He showed that FFmpeg will automatically detect, rid gaps in talking. And and remember there was, like, a tool that you used Yeah. That would, like, remove the gaps? Yeah. I'm pretty sure that was just a UI for rid FFmpeg because you parse it, and it will tell you where the gaps are, and you can give it, like, min and max. So So if we were talking and we stopped talking for 10 seconds, you could just run it through FFmpeg, and it would

detect the silence and remove it. Yeah. Yeah. And and shout out to recut out there because it is a really great experience to use that thing, Because what you can do, you just drop in your video. It detects the gaps. You click on the ones you want it to remove, and then it it saves it almost instantly, or you can export it to Premiere, Final Cut, Resolve. Some yep. Yeah. I I mean, that is one of those things that I wished Any of my video editing apps had baked in forever, but the fact that it is just an that that that makes a that makes a lot of sense to me personally.

Rid Yeah. Yeah. So we'll kinda figure out what I think between the transcripts and later on, I'm gonna talk about, like, deploying, rid maybe putting the m p threes in Git directly.

I think that there we could just automate all of that and just have it rid All ready to go. I love having it up on GitHub because people submit pull requests all the time with clarifications or spelling mistakes or adding links or anything like that. Yeah. Totally. Alright. Well, what about, like, the player itself? You know, you mentioned,

you know, potentially being able to integrate The transcripts with the player. I think there's a lot of, like, fun things we can do with the player itself because players are are you know, they're they're rid Very bare bones, but sometimes you you do come across something that is thinking about it in a much more interesting way. And I think we have again, But with everything else here, I think we have a unique opportunity to do some really fascinating things here, and both of us do have a lot of experience here considering We, you know, we work on video platforms. We work on players. I've built a lot of player type of interfaces myself. I know you have as well. So, Like, what types of fun things could we do? You know, it's funny. Initially, my thoughts initially went straight to, like, what kind of fun, playful, Whimsical UI things could we do to this? I had a fun idea of, like, having a CD player and, like, very on brand for us to have a CD player and a CD spinning. And a lot of these Zoomers will be like, what is that?

Yeah. I I was also thinking if you know if you have transcripts, the transcripts knows rid Who's talking when. So the player could show the waveforms of who's talking and then color code them. Rid I've always liked the SoundCloud player where people comment at specific times.

So, like, wouldn't it be cool to add some sort of Commenting system where people could tag it or, like, emphasize specific times, like reactions to specific things. Yeah. That'd be, like, very, rid. Very TikTok to be able to just, like, press the the heart button at certain spots or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Like, hit the hit the heart button at a specific time. You could see where Where people are or or even, like, YouTube where people are scrubbing to a specific spot, you can see where where they're scrubbing to. Being able to share a specific rid clip from the player? Like like, what if someone were to say, oh, man, these 2 sentences Scott said about Svelte is really, rid Informative. So you could just, like, click and drag and then send that link to somebody, and it would highlight it in the transcript. Or maybe you could even, Like, make a video with it. Right? We thought what's the, React based, video player that Remotion. Right? You could you could literally give the person a because every now and then, somebody will say, oh, good point on The Syntax podcast, and they will link. They'll make they'll share, like, a little video, and it has has what we're saying over top of it and all that stuff. And just like, wow. That's that would be cool to give power to other people. Yeah. Right? What if somebody wants to clip 1 of us saying,

something about taking a big dump Yeah. Or Singing sloppy joes or or any of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And another thing is, you know, that goes along pretty pretty significantly with filtering and searches is tagging of episodes. Right? Because that's not necessarily something I think either of us wanna spend the time to do each time. Right? Let's let's go in there and manually tag each episode. Granted, we we could do that, but it does feel like the type of thing we could, we could implement via, Let's let's have transcripts. Right? And then let's take those transcripts and parse out Looking for certain words, like which words are used the most frequently, and what is the relevance of those words rid to maybe the whole of the rest of the episode. So whether or not this is, like, using AI or whether or not this is just using, you know, deduction with code to say, This episode should be tagged with React, right, automatically. Yeah. I think

it definitely has to be automatic. Look. If there's anything I've learned from people's WordPress blogs is nobody takes any time to manage tagging or or anything like that. So it would be really rid Cool to have it automatic.

And I think I think AI is probably that. I don't know how that works, but I'm assuming you could feed maybe we have to train rid Something based on all the existing. You might have to get the syntax army out, 600 of you to each take an episode and tag each 1 or something like that. But, at At a certain point, I think we could make that automatic. I think there I think you could do it automatic to

a big degree even without training in that kind of way, but I think that I think it would be a fun problem to solve. I I think that's the the key to a lot of this stuff

is that every single one of these things feels like a fun problem to solve, And it makes me want to start working on it already. Right? You know what? We also need, once we have transcript, is a word cloud. Yes. Remember word cloud? Classic word cloud. Yeah. Oh, yeah. What do you think our top word would be in syntax? Specificity.

Specificity. Got it. Nailed it. I'm very curious what it would would actually be. Somebody somebody once parsed out every single syntax episode in in Python and and tallied up rid who talked more.

And it was, like, 58% me, 42% you, or something like that. Or it's like it's slightly more In my direction, it'd be kinda cool to have stats on that type of stuff. Yeah. It would be nice. Because, like, I don't know. If you're doing it, might as well, like, put some fun stuff into the

into it. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. What about so video, this has been something that's on our brain for a long time. People have often since the inception of of syntax have been like, is there going to be a video podcast? Is there is a video is going to be involved in rid. I think we resisted it for a long time, mostly because we wake up on Monday morning, and we, we we pull ourselves into the office, And then we start recording, so I think video sometimes felt like maybe something that we couldn't do Yeah. Or or wouldn't be a smart idea for us to do. But I think, you know, integrating video into rid. A podcast about coding feels like the thing that needs to happen considering, one, we both do a ton of video work outside of syntax, and We both have a lot of experience there, but, also, you know, I think it it adds a different degree of, it just that that sense of Community or sense of realness to the whole thing, you see a lot of podcasts now are straight video shows. It's almost like rid. What what what's happened is we've taken the podcast format, and it's evolved into, like, a talk show type of deal almost. Yeah. So it really feels like that's rid a direction we need to lean into, at least to some degree. And I've I've been thinking about maybe it's only even maybe the Maybe the video component is the tasty treat episodes.

Maybe the tasty treat episodes are the video episodes. We do them live on video. Rid You know, we we have them in the studio video type of deal. We can share screen. We can do those types of things and teach while we're Yeah. Doing the podcast, rid cast, and then maybe we leave the hasty treats and the the the supper club because I don't wanna burden our guests To have to be look presentable all the time, and maybe we do eventually. But I I because I've seen I think the big thing with video is that you can then get clips

out of rid The podcast. Because right now, like, we can't make a TikTok out of it because there's not like, we we actually do record the video, for every single one, but we don't we don't do anything with it.

But if it if we could, like, purp repurpose that or or cut it into clips or something like that, that would be really nice to be able to share it because people have something to look at. And then someone messaged me the other day. They said, I just wanna see what you're talking about on your screen. And I was like, oh, like Yeah. Like, I can have a monitor, and, like, whenever I wanna throw something up, you just throw it on that screen. Like, you have a little stream deck or whatever. It would be nice. Hey. Hey. Hey, Chris. Throw that up on the screen right now. Those are podcast I think. Throw that up. Do do a quick search of monkeys can write CSS.

Hey, I'm on food mother's view. Put put it up on the screen right now. Yeah. Let's get it. Oh, that would be good. I I think, like, I watch and listen to the, rid The WAN Show from Linus Tech Tips. And I primarily listen to it on audio, but then rid I the clips pop up on my YouTube every now and then, and it's just a it's it's funny because it's just them it's just them sitting in front of their laptops. It's not interesting at all, But the the added context of how their hands are are waving, and sometimes they can share their screen and, looking at each other and whatnot, It really helps. I think that they do a very good job at that. But also from audience perspective,

you know, Podcast themselves is still pretty niche at the end of the day in terms of the amount of people listening to podcasts. Now granted, a ton of people do listen to podcasts, rid. But the amount of people who listen to YouTube is way more.

They exist for longer.

They are easier for somebody to just put on and and watch, and I think you you could end up having a much larger audience simply by having a video component that is

Good looking and on on YouTube. Totally. And it's just it's like a whole another audience of of YouTube, TikTok.

Rid if it Flip flop. Yeah. Flip flop. Yeah. Flip flop on Twitter, things like that. What about

show notes? Show notes.

Rid Time stamps. We just added clickable time stamps, which is great. Our editor, Chris, adds time stamps into the show notes, and they're clickable in your podcast player, but They were never clickable in in the show notes. So I love how you say we when it's something that you get. But it I was just like, oh, yeah. That's rid That's the easy thing to do. So I just banged it out and added it. So there's that.

But, like, there's there's probably something else that could be added to it. Like, rid There's probably some interesting ways that you can overlay transcripts or clips or bookmarks or something rid into the actual show notes to make it, like, an immersive experience.

I was just thinking, like, we just use straight markdown right now. Is there any is there anything That would benefit from using MDX

inside of that thing. I'm not totally sure. Yeah. I'm not totally sure either. MDX does Feel like a great tech, but at the end of the day, it does it there's something in me that, like, makes me feel like it's Maybe not the thing to to bet all of your horses on. Oh, yeah. I so I use

MDX on my blog, But I don't use do I use? I use, like, a YouTube component.

And, like, I don't I don't do so much that I would be rid locked into it, like, long term for that type of stuff. Like, I could always just parse that that type of stuff out. Yeah. So if we wanted to, like, embed stuff, I think that would be helpful, but that you gotta you gotta think, like, at the end of the day, it has to be parsed into rid Static HTML because I think the most of the way a lot of people consume the show notes are via the podcast player, and you're you're not dropping a a Rack component into your

Oh, right. Yeah. That is a big issue right there. Yeah. And you don't the last thing you want to do is to split those 2 things, right, to where the website has rid A specific type of show notes, and the the podcast itself has a specific type of show notes because that just like with anything here that we're talking about, once you start to Splinter the system into ways like that or, again, like with tagging, anytime you end up having to have that human intervention there, then the systems will just rot. I think another

Interesting problem is how do you surface the good content? If you look at the stats, people do find the old good content, especially now that the rid The Spotify. Like, I gave Spotify a lot of crap for their podcast, but their search is so good. You just search for a specific topic that you're interested in, and it will show you podcasts that are related to that. And that didn't really exist before that. There was not, Like a good implementation of I want to listen to podcasts about with this person. Like, I want to listen to podcasts where Rich Harris has been on, or I want to listen to podcasts about, rid this specific tech. And now you can do that type of thing. So I think we could go a step further and say, like, okay. Well, here, like, we've done all the fundamentals episodes. We have a lot of really popular episodes. We've done a lot of, like, game show episodes. So wouldn't it be cool to be able to somehow surface rid. Those so that someone says, alright. I'm gonna go back and listen to all the fundamentals episodes at once. I think that's a pretty simple thing to fix. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

And I I wonder a lot about the just the general way in which that exists. So the servicing good content, we have our analytics through. Libsyn is where we host the podcast.

How much access do we have to that

Via API. That's a good question. I don't know.

I'm I'm assuming we can get it. I'm I'm assuming we can get it too. We're we're likely rid going to be moving off of Lipson anyway? Do you think so? Well, Chris, our Chris, our editor, is just just cries because it's so painful to use, and rid It's off and, like, the Lipson the stats from Spotify are, like, not being piped into our stats. And, like, I've been on on so many support chats with them, and it's just a garbage product overall. They, like, made Libsyn 5. Like, they just made a whole new version, but, like, it just It feels like there's, like, a lot better options out there. The the one thing is, like, Lipson is very cheap compared to a lot of the,

a lot of the alternatives. I think, like, our podcast is, like, 30 or $40 a month or something like that to host. So We don't need a lot of the features that the other ones are giving you. The other rid. Are gonna give you a website. They're gonna give you those platforms. Ads.

Yeah. Yeah. You're right. And we don't need that stuff. Right? Yeah.

So, like, having a bare bones setup, but at the same, I don't wanna make Chris cry. I don't. No. But I I do feel bad about what is the situation If we move it and something gets messed up with our trending or our,

position or or yeah. I feel, like, very concerned about that for some time. Why I haven't moved it is, like, I don't wanna mess up a good thing.

Right? Like, I don't wanna move it, and then all of a sudden people get Every podcast downloaded in their player because of the RSS feed. And I even thought about, like and it's not that complicated. Like, I look you look at the RSS feed and you're like, I I could generate this on my own, but it's really the stats that the stats and the, like, CDN caching and stuff like that that rid. Is is the benefit of the podcast platform. Yep. And and so if that RSS feed, like, majorly changes for past episodes,

rid How does Apple or like you said, how do they handle that? I think you can you can make sure

that it doesn't before you do it. Like, you could just You could just have it set up on both and run a diff on it and just really make sure. Like, we're not the 1st people to ever move a an RSS feed. And the nice thing about it is that we very glad I did this is when we set up the podcast, I put the RSS feed on the syntax domain.

So rid Everywhere the RSS feed is is not like RSS.libsyn.com.

You know? Like, they were not locked into it. It's like using an email address from your ISP. Rid That's a it seems good

initially, but then you're locked in for life. Yeah. I know. I think about I think about Everyone with a at Comcast

email address. Yeah. I think some sort of collections episode.

Oh, collections. Absolutely. Yeah. Rid. Yeah. And and the interface can surface that stuff in a really, like, nice way. You know, a lot of the things when I think about you know, my brain immediately goes to, like, rid. Gooey aspects of it. Like, what are these fun but also meaningful ways that we can present this Data, this massive collection of audio files that has a lot of good educational content that I think, you know, 500, 600 episodes where Being able to access the stuff from the fundamentals episodes, all of the fundamentals episodes we did really, you know, easily and quickly because it's not like We need to rerecord those episodes just to resurface them, and sometimes people what they do with podcasts is they'll just rerelease.

I think about, like, how did this get made as a podcast about movies? And that that's what they've been doing is All of their old episodes, they've just been releasing, like, 1 a week now as a matinee episode. It's like, okay. But I've already heard this. I don't want it to show up on my my feet again.

There there has to be a better way to surface that content than just to rerelease it. Freaking hate when,

like, good podcasts you like rid Start just re republishing it. It makes sense because, like, a lot of people have joined since then, but, like, like, This American Life rid Did that. I finally just unsubscribed because they would just every time they published 1, I'd be like, I've heard this. This is I've listened to the 11 year backlog I mean, 11 years of backlog rid catalog, and now they only have a new one, like, once a year. Interaction would be kind of cool. I'm not sure what that looks like, but polls or something like that. I I like the idea you said of hearts at a specific time stamp in the player,

but some sort of, like, Audience input would be neat. Reactions, and we can do it all with emoji. You know, everybody loves emojis, so it's not like we have to get wacky with that. But there's a lot of, like, fun ideas for, rid how how we could express

reactions to certain certain aspects of the site. And and now that you now that we we say that, now I'm going back rid Oh, maybe it is a good idea to tie log in to a GitHub account because as soon as you let people vote or create or do anything, then you're, People are gonna spam it, create a whole bunch of accounts. You know? There's comments, things like that. But if you tie it to something that is hard to get or hard to get approved, like a GitHub rid account. Right. Then it's, a bit easier. That's why people do that type of thing. We've already kinda talked about that. This is this is interesting one that I have is rid Right now, what happens is we write the show notes in Markdown, or or our editor, Chris, does. He takes our, like, chicken scratch that we write down It makes it into show notes and time stamps and everything like that. And then he publishes the markdown to the Git repo, but then He has to, like, convert the markdown to HTML and then copy paste that into Libsyn. And then if there's an error, we have to go to 2 spots and correct it. Right? And then and if they're, rid It's kind of annoying. Like, there's not a single source of truth for this type of thing. So I'm trying to think, like, wouldn't it be cool if we use Git LFS, which is rid Large file storage. I've never used that myself, but I was like, I wanna put the m p threes on GitHub and, rid be able to pass that into whatever is transcribing and and be able to automatically push that to our podcast host. And then if there is an update to a specific

show, then it would just automatically do a build and push it Yeah. To our podcast host with any any specific updates. I think within with all of this stuff, like, kind of what we're getting at too in the process, the the stuff that everyone else doesn't see is that the process, rid. Could be tuned up to a way where we have a single source of truth for everything, and it just becomes easier For all of us Mhmm. To publish and to make changes and to make updates, Yeah. I I have never used Git LFS myself either, but The single source of truth thing, I think, is something that needs to happen definitely.

Yeah. It's it like, it would I guess it wouldn't be single source of truth for the m p 3 because