💾 Archived View for moddedbear.xyz › logs › 2022-02-09-introducing-rocketcaster.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:01:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I was chatting with a friend a couple of days ago and they mentioned that they thought it'd be cool if they could use a gemini browser like Lagrange to subscribe to podcasts. I'd never played around with gemini scripting before but this seemed like a simple enough idea to introduce myself to it.
A few days later and I'm ready to release what I've decided to call RocketCaster.
It makes use of podcastindex.org's API to allow people to search for, share links to, and subscribe to podcasts over gemini.
Episodes also have their own pages with show notes and a direct web link to the episode's audio.
The functionality right now is pretty simple but I sort of like that. I may add a browse feature in the future but I'd have to do a little more testing with podcastindex.org's API to see how viable that is. If that doesn't pan out, podcastindex.org also has their entire database available for download which would certainly work. In any case, browsing is more of a long-term goal for now.
If gemcasts (podcasts published on gemini) start to become more common, I'll certainly add a list of them to make them easier to find.
I'm not aware of any major bugs (the code is really simple after all), but I have noticed that some show notes include html tags. I'll have to write something to strip those out, but fortunately they're not very common.
The code is available on GitHub if you would like to take a look at it, submit any issues, or contribute.
https://github.com/moddedBear/rocketcaster
Speaking of code, big thanks to Mozz for writing Jetforce and Astrobotany. Jetforce makes it real easy to build dynamic gemini content, and the Astrobotany code was a great resource for learning how to use it.
- moddedBear / 2022-02-09