The Sword and Laser discussion

Hi, the rss feed I use to subscribe to sword & laser is now filled with the video podcasts, which are unfortunately useless to me, as I listen to podcasts when running or driving.

Is there an rss feed that has the audio podcasts only? Or will there not be any more audio podcasts? (Say it ain't so, joe!)

Try this:

http://swordandlaser.com/?category=po...

Thanks, but can't get that to work as an RSS feed.

Okay, I looked a bit further. This link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheSwordA...

looks like it includes both video and audio podcasts for RSS. If that doesn't work, I dunno. (I use a podcatcher called Downcast on my iPad; you might want to check into podcatchers that use iTunes on whatever computer you collect podcasts on.)

Yeah, the only RSS feed I could find has both video and audio. I don't use itunes unfortunately (or fortunately). I use an app called Dogcatcher on Android.

Here are some apps to explore:

http://www.androidappsforwork.com/and...

Good luck! At least one uses iTunes, so fingers crossed....

The feedburner url Serendi posted is the one I use also. It does include both video and audio podcasts, but the podcatcher I use automatically downloads only the audio episodes, and posts the video entries as webpages with the video embedded.

Morten wrote: "Hi, the rss feed I use to subscribe to sword & laser is now filled with the video podcasts, which are unfortunately useless to me, as I listen to podcasts when running or driving.

Is there an rss ..."

Hi Morten are you saying the video episodes are downloading in your audio feed? If so that shouldn't happen. I use Downcast for my podcast subscriptions and only the audio episodes show up.

Hi Tom, my podcatcher (Dogcatcher) downloads both audio and video episodes yes.

I see you have separate feeds for video and audio in itunes, so why not do the same for the rss feed?

Would it be possible to put the old shows in a separate iTunes feed and call it something like S&L Archives. You could maybe do one for each year or two. I came late to the party and now all the old episodes have disappeared. Stupid iTunes. *grumble grumble*

I think it a bit much to ask Veronica and Tom to set up a special archive feed in iTunes just to make it easier for you to get them.

But if you go to the website all the audio episodes back to 2008 are available:

http://swordandlaser.com/?page=7&...

So they are readily available, just not in iTunes. If you want an easy way to track and download old episodes, just use a standalone RSS reader like Feedly or something.

There are even podcatchers that will sync with RSS readers, and some of these allow you 'read back' an arbitrary number of episodes into the feed's history.

Morten, there are separate feeds for audio and video. They aren't special iTunes feeds they're just regular rss feeds made by feedburner. iTunes isn't special. I use Downcast and it only gets the audio enclosures from the audio feed. I don't know why dogcatcher is going out of it's way to download video. There are no video enclosures int hat feed. So it must be seeing the link to archive.org exploring that link and then downloading videos from there. because there are no videos linked from the audio feed rss, only show notes linking out to archive.org.

I'll download dogcatcher for myself and see if I can tell what it's doing. But it's not supposed to work that way and most other podcatchers (not just itunes) only pull in audio from the audio feed.

Sorry about this.

Just downloade Dogcatcher and I think I see what's going on.

Unliked most podcatchers, Dogcatcher is showing you every listing in the feed instead of just showing you the audio files. So I see listings for the videos, but there is no download happening. I only get downloads for audio.

Podcatchers aren't supposed to work that way. Dogcatcher is showing you more than it needs to to deliver podcasts. We automatically create our audio podcast feed from the main blog rss feed which is why the posting info is in there. Fixing that would mean having to manually create an audio rss feed and we haven't got the time unfortunately. Especially since I've never run across another podcatcher (pocketcasts, downcasts, stitcher etc...) that does it this way.

I'll send a note to Podcatcher asking them if they can add a feature to allow you to only show audio enclosures instead of all posts. Unfortunately that's the best we can do. Your other option would be to switch to pocketcasts or something like that.

@Tom @Morten

I use BeyondPod (Android), and it also shows every item in the feed, but it only automatically downloads audio files. Everything else it just displays in a browser built into (or called by) the app when you activate the link.

This is actually a rather nice feature I think: it provides RSS-like ability to follow all the posts on swordandlaser.com (including showing your links to your video content as embeds!) while still acting as a 'regular' podcatcher. Best of both worlds it seems to me.

Thanks Tom, I assumed the RSS feed contained both audio and video enclosures. If it doesn't, I agree this is a fault with Dogcatcher. I asked on the dogcatcher forum, and a feature is planned where you can select to download only audio items. So that should solve the issue. I'd rather not switch podcatcher, as apart from this issue it's really good.

Mysterio2 wrote: "I think it a bit much to ask Veronica and Tom to set up a special archive feed in iTunes just to make it easier for you to get them.

But if you go to the website all the audio episodes back to 20..."

I know that they are there on the website, but scrolling through and manually downloading over 100 episodes is time consuming, and I was hoping there was a simple end run around iTunes' cap. Feedly is only going back about 16 months. That still leaves over 95 episodes.

Sean we're working on it. First 40 eps are available here, I believe the tracker link was your idea, no?

http://swordandlaser.com/fan-made-epi...

Tom wrote: "Sean we're working on it. First 40 eps are available here, I believe the tracker link was your idea, no?

No, I can't take credit for that, but thanks for putting them out there. I abandoned torrents years ago for the usual reasons, but I'm sure I can figure something out.

Sean wrote: "Feedly is only going back about 16 months. That still leaves over 95 episodes"

Sorry. Didn't realize Feedly capped the feed; obviously that makes a big difference.

I hadn't set up a new reader since Google Reader got killed, and I just expected other readers would work more or less like Reader did. I went to the trouble of setting up Feedly and importing the old feeds I'd saved from Google Takeout, and yes, Feedly appears to only present a small portion of the history of feeds.

One more reason to lament the passing of Reader, I guess.

Sean wrote: "Tom wrote: "Sean we're working on it. First 40 eps are available here, I believe the tracker link was your idea, no?

No, I can't take credit for that, but thanks for putting them out there. I aba..."

Yeah I know those reasons. Which is why I made the trackers available directly from our site. So you know here you're getting them from.

Mysterio2 wrote: "Sean wrote: "Feedly is only going back about 16 months. That still leaves over 95 episodes"

Sorry. Didn't realize Feedly capped the feed; obviously that makes a big difference.

I hadn't set up a ..."

It's actually Squarespace that caps the feed. It's a known issue.

@Veronica

Thanks for the clarification.

I tracked down some old RSS caches from the Internet Archive, but that was hit and miss, so I just gave up and made an Audio Podcast Episode Guide on the Sword and Laser Wiki.

The titles link back to the S&L page for each episode, so if anyone else wants to go back and hear old episodes, they can listen or download from there. It still needs some tweaking but it's complete and current to #138.

By the way, when I checked, Episode #93 was missing.

Sean wrote: "I tracked down some old RSS caches from the Internet Archive, but that was hit and miss, so I just gave up and made an Audio Podcast Episode Guide on the Sword and Laser Wiki.

The titles link bac..."

I see the link to the audio file at the bottom of the post, seems to be working ok for me?

http://archive.org/download/SlPodcast...

Veronica wrote: "I see the link to the audio file at the bottom of the post, seems to be working ok for me?"

It was broken on Saturday and Sunday, but it seems to be working fine now. A server glitch maybe?