Inspiration

I have been on the podcast train for over three years now. Every once in a while, I get asked, or feel like asking someone what podcasts are they subscribed to?. There is no Goodreads for podcast. To solve this, I made an app that allows you to make easily shareable podcast lists.

One key difference between Goodreads and this project is that most of the activity (reading) for Goodreads, does not happen on a device. For when it does (eBooks), the experience is that much better. With features like sharing quotes and marking up text are part of the reading experience. However, all of podcast consumption happens on a device. This makes them easy to share and start listening to new shows.

New Tools Used

Vue

I made my last couple of project on React. They were fun to make and I like using React. When I heard of Vue overtaking React on Github (a fairly cosmetic metric), I wanted to try Vue and see for myself.

I did find Vue easier to use and manage than React. Routing, for instance, was phenonemally quick to setup with vuerouter as compared to its React counterpart. vuecli also was easy to get started with, but create-react-app isn’t too far behind.

Netlify

This was my first experience using Netlify to host my project. Previously I was using surge.sh and got along just fine. But Netlify is so much more than a static site host that I will probaly migrate all my projects to it.

There were a bunch of cool things about Netlify:

• Easy integration with Github
• Simple build setup
• Custom Domain
• HTTPS support with Let’s Encrypt
• By far the simplest CI workflow I have come across

iTunes Search API

Having a quick podcast search was really important to the project. I ended up abusing the iTunes search API for my search. It mostly gives blazing fast algolia level results, but does start choking up every once in a while.

I am still considering scraping the iTunes podcast directory and doing the search without AJAX calls.

Take it for a spin!

The site is live at https://www.podwhat.com

Here is a list of (some) podcasts I am currently listening to.

Features planned

• OPML integration
• Analytics (Popular podcasts across your feed)
• Social layer (logins 🤮, friends, profiles, etc.)
• Recommendations based on your list

Vote for your favourite feature!