Barry Luijbregts

Building www.podhome.fm. Intelligent podcast tools to help you create, host and distribute your podcasts.

Website: https://www.podhome.fm

Public Key

npub1fkfpdaq0afafls4dpwznaqquuxxwm99qv579e8862sq3kzhsdzksgh84sp

NIP-05 Address

podhome_at_podcastindex.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsymysk7s87575lc2kshpf7sqwwrr8djjsx20zunna9gqgmptcx3tgprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wdmksetjv5hxxmmdqyv8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddakk7um5wgh8q6twdvg5mrff

Publishing to

relay.noswhere.com

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1fkfpdaq0afafls4dpwznaqquuxxwm99qv579e8862sq3kzhsdzksgh84sp

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Last Notes

2024-09-08 15:50:50

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pretty please 🙏

2024-09-08 15:45:58

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they should, it’s super easy to set up. Are the guys on here?

2024-09-08 15:32:07

Does [@2250f69694c2a43929e77e5de0f6a61ae5e37a1ee6d6a3baef1706ed9901248b](https://mostr.pub/users/2250f69694c2a43929e77e5de0f6a61ae5e37a1ee6d6a3baef1706ed9901248b ) podping?

2024-09-05 13:56:49

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Next is more for discovery, before I start with the client app. I want to create an API that I can use to search for podcasts, episodes, people and topics. Ideally this works with my own data, and the Podcast Index API as augmentation (if I don’t have the results myself, so that users can always find a podcast)

2024-09-05 13:56:36

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I’m monitoring the behavior to see if I can scale anything back and fix errors when I run into them.
One example is that a feed contained items with a duration of -1 seconds. I parse this into a C# TimeSpan, which works, but fails when I save it to the database. Just stuff like that.
This backend serves 2 purposes:
1️⃣ discovery: show users podcasts and episodes they might be interested in
2️⃣ notifications: notify users when a new episode is published for a podcast they are interested in

2024-09-05 13:55:00

2,5 weeks into building the backend for my podcast app. I’m not working on it fulltime as I’m working on @Podhomefm for our awesome customers.
I now run two databases, a writable one and a read-only replica. This works sooo much better for performance.
I run my podping listener in one Function App (Linux, B2 size), and the feed puller in another Function App (Linux, B3 series), because ai found that running it all in one Function app didn’t fit memory-wise.
https://cdn.masto.host/podcastindexsocial/media_attachments/files/113/085/280/677/471/013/original/52033c6b8c854782.mp4

2024-08-30 17:26:45

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at Podhome.fm, you can host your music show and simply configure value recipients and much more. You can even go live in the podcast apps. Go try it out at www.podhome.fm

2024-08-30 16:10:12

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I would be very curious to know what you’re spending for what kind of horsepower. And how we can help to optimize that for you, perhaps with $$$

2024-08-30 13:41:01

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that might be a good idea for the index though, as you have a very high workload.

2024-08-30 12:03:46

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it’s fast enough. At the moment is it a 10 euro a month Azure SQL, so I will scale up. I just want it to run as efficient as possible. Later I’ll have this sync to a read only copy (easy to do in Azure) to be used by APIs that the app will use

2024-08-30 11:46:36

I've been running this for most of the day now, and it seems to be able to keep up. Although I see some lags where it lags a couple of minutes when it needs to process many feeds at once. The bottleneck is the database, which is clear to me. I'll let this run this weekend, so that Azure SQL Database can figure out which queries can benefit from which indexes, and see how the performance profile is after that.
Next is to figure out what the client (app) architecture is going to be.

2024-08-30 11:46:25

When podpings are found, I create an Azure Service Bus Queue message for each block to update, containing the Uris to fetch and parse. Each Queue message triggers a QueueTriggered Function that does the parsing. This can fan out to many Functions running in parallel, and seems to fit very well with my €45 / month Linux App Service Plan.

2024-08-30 11:46:10

So I ended up with a TimerTriggered Function that, every 5 minutes, checks if my Podping listener is still running. If not, it starts it again with the next Hive blockId that I need to process.

2024-08-30 11:46:03

That takes a lot of processing power as some podpings contain many Uris to RSS feeds (for instance when Buzzsprout fires a batch of new episodes).
I first tried to use Azure Durable Functions to make this scale, like I do with the pull updates for RSS feeds. But that was not the right choice here. Because I want to Podping listener to run always. And Durable Functions are meant to have an ending. If not, they are rehydrated and run again, which results in duplicate instances running.

2024-08-30 11:45:51

Each Podping contains one or more Uris to podcast RSS feeds that have been updated. I first thought to take this as truth and use Podpings to let users know that something in the feed has updated. But that is not good enough. I want to let users know what specifically has updated. New episode? A Live episode started? Which one? So for every podping I run my RSS parser to go through the RSS feed, update it in the database and see what is new.

2024-08-30 11:45:13

More work on the backend for my podcast app today (after a lot of backend work for @npub1fkf…84sp).
I now have the Podping worker running. This uses https://github.com/bmaluijb/HivePodpingAPI to retrieve "Podping" blocks from the Hive blockchain and process them for updates.

2024-08-28 15:32:10

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yeah, there are a LOT of crap feeds out there.

2024-08-28 15:27:11

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I think I’m being dense. I didn’t even realize that a GET like that just stops after the headers. Thanks man, discussions like these keep us efficient!

2024-08-28 14:58:57

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because a GET downloads the whole thing, and a HEAD just gets the headers. So to be nice on the feed hosters,I try not to download the whole feed if I don’t need to, even if that means that I ping them with another request.

2024-08-28 14:09:39

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no, I try a HEAD if possible, and then don’t get when not modified. A lot of feeds don’t support HEAD requests, so the GET to check not modified is only when HEAD is not supported

2024-08-28 13:42:01

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on the pull feeds, it depends. I store ETag and Last-Modifed, and send them as headers. I then do a HEAD request, which could tell@me it is not modified. If the HEAD fails and the same with GET results in not modified, I skip it for this round and continue the pull schedule (which depends on the interest of the user). When it is modified and I do a GET, I store the new ETag and Last-Modified for the last round.

2024-08-28 13:15:29

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I love C# and Visual Studio (Code).

2024-08-28 13:08:16

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Next for me is to update RSS feeds that are Podpinged. I’m again going to use Azure Durable Functions for that. Each time a Podping happens, I’ll extract the URLs (feeds) to update, and send those to a worker Function that handles them asynchronously.
One thing that I’ve already noticed is that the feeds being Podpinged mostly don’t have the <podcast:podping> tag in them, so they are in my database as feeds that need to be pulled. I’ll update them as they are Podpinged.

2024-08-28 13:08:00

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So I just adapted the C# CHive library, in combination with with a Podping JS library to roll my own C# HivePodpingAPI. That’s the thing in the video.
If you’re interested in listening to Podping using C#, clone it, change it, use it from here: https://github.com/bmaluijb/HivePodpingAPI

2024-08-28 13:07:20

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You can listen to updates, which all have a block id, and pick up where you left off when your service restarts or goes down.
To get the updates, I can watch the Hive blockchain for Podping messages. I first wanted to listen to a websocket thing that
@npub1g2v…achf built, and backtrack with an API when the connection dropped or something. That is inherently unreliable, as I can still miss things m, and it is difficult to get the timings right. Also, I don’t want to rely on another abstraction layer.

2024-08-28 13:06:54

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A lot of feeds use WebSub, which is a publish and subscribe mechanism. This works okay, and I can listen to those updates. But if I miss one (when my service is down, or the hub is down, or because of a transient issue, like a connection drop), I can never get the update again. As this is unreliable, I have no choice but to pull these podcasts periodically.
A better way is Podping. This is a podcast update mechanism that writes podcast updates to the Hive blockchain.

2024-08-28 13:06:00

Podping, WebSub and pull for podcast updates.
For my podcast app, I’m keeping my own database. Just for the purpose of showing users podcasts for discovery, and to be able to send users notifications when something happens like new or live episodes for shows that they are subscribed to.
I have my updater running that pulls feeds a couple times a day, and pulls and parses priority feeds (that users are subscribed to) every 30 minutes or less.

2024-08-27 17:19:07

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yeah, it is, isn’t it? I’ll share here as well

2024-08-27 17:16:43

If anyone is interested: I’m sharing my adventures of building a podcast app on X: http://x.com/azurebarry happy to share it here as well, but I don’t want to flood this space.

2024-08-26 13:05:12

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Here are some good test cases:
Ungovernable Misfits (good for GIFs in chapters): https://serve.podhome.fm/rss/23c0e268-b6a5-4ae7-b73a-1bb0cf853978
Value 4 Value (large value block and remote items): https://serve.podhome.fm/rss/80662af1-0d5f-5f3d-bd9b-ca5b29d68cf5
The Sword of the Spirit Podcast (goes live weekly and usually schedules it): https://serve.podhome.fm/rss/54aeb0b5-9e06-5ebd-b9dd-7f473e8f85d3

2024-08-26 13:01:48

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like Visual Studio

2024-08-26 12:35:46

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replace all 😄 I would change them all, but that's just me

2024-08-15 19:55:24

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I was thinking that too. Not only the ones with an AppleId of course, but the “active” ones.
Thanks Dave!

2024-08-15 19:08:15

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great website! Yeah, that’s probably best.
Again, it’s not that important, as I’m not looking for a complete catalog anyways.

2024-08-15 18:46:07

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what a beautiful website! When I look at “active” podcasts there, it seems much closer to my number.
When I start parsing the feeds, and listen for updates, I’ll find out soon enough if these are truly the active podcasts.
In any case, it’s not that important, as these will serve as the initial base for discovery. Usage will fill the database with what users actively listen to

2024-08-15 18:34:49

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I'm initially filling the database by calling the Itunes API. I'm looping through categories and sub categories and countries. After running this, I found 427647 podcasts that have a feedUrl (not all do). Does that seem right @npub1rcn…dw4h (as the PI website says 10x that number)? I'll check tomorrow in a download of the PI DB to see how many have an Apple Id, but it seems low.

2024-08-15 18:28:00

I'm building a podcast app. The backend will have a database with shows and (limited)episodes so that I can display shows to discover and send out notifications when something of value happens (new episode, episode live).
Users will be able to search on podcasts with a combination from the PI API, Itunes API and my own database, to have redundancy and speed.

2024-08-09 12:38:27

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We used ASP.NET Blazor, plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript and run it on an Microsoft Azure Web App on Linux. No more Squarespace and a lot more control.

2024-08-09 12:36:12

We rebuilt our public website https://www.podhome.fm/
It's a lot cleaner, faster and explains things better.
More to come!

2024-08-07 08:04:07

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yes please: https://app.cal.com/video/aCaWmoAPyyFZVgeDhpcBir

2024-08-03 09:10:35

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the looks great! Happy building!

2024-07-28 14:55:03

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My question remains: what kind of error are you getting from that feed Dave?

2024-07-09 15:20:44

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we only file the startTime at Podhome. As I understand, no player apps use endTime at the moment (please let me know if I’m wrong)

2024-07-05 20:56:12

@npub1ucg…flfw you might enjoy episodes.fm to share your podcast with listeners. Just one link like this: https://episodes.fm/501575043

2024-07-05 19:57:25

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we even detect chapters from episode descriptions, and turn them into Chapters in Podhome (and then create a json file and bake them into the MP3).
We also detect them when you import a show, so that you immediately have modern chapters.

2024-07-05 19:50:44

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yes. As there are sooooo many legacy apps out there, we make sure to:
- create a Chapters json file
- bake chapters into the MP3
- provide an easy way to include chapters in your description (Spotify can use those for instance)

2024-07-03 15:53:36

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that’s great! I’ll look into that

2024-07-03 15:53:36

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that’s great! I’ll look into that

2024-07-02 21:30:06

I’m thinking about building a podcast app for Podhome, as a companion to the hosting platform. It seems like something fun to build. Somebody please convince me that this is a bad idea 😂

2024-06-26 13:30:23

New Episode! "Automatically Generate Transcripts, Chapters, Clips and More with Michael Katz from Flowsend.ai". Listen in your favorite #podcast app: https://episodes.fm/1733269327
https://cdn.masto.host/podcastindexsocial/media_attachments/files/112/683/163/356/597/862/original/8b5c6a679be12fe4.jpeg

2024-06-19 13:30:29

New Episode! "Podcasting Insights with Kyrin Down (@npub10t6…ehc4) from Mere Mortals Podcast". Listen in your favorite #podcast app: https://episodes.fm/1733269327
https://cdn.masto.host/podcastindexsocial/media_attachments/files/112/643/527/538/966/262/original/da452cad605fe0d2.jpeg