Site Updates: /listens and /photos pages

Inspired by Jonathan LaCour's January post about tracking his podcast listening habits, I recently decided to bring in my own listening history into my website.

Like Jonathan, I use Overcast to listen to podcasts on my phone, and I was surprised and delighted to learn that Overcast has an "All data" export option on the accounts page that includes per-episode details such as whether you listened to an ep, and when you last interacted with it!

I took a look at Jonathan's script to automatically log in and import his Overcast data and figured I could make something a little more minimal that would work with my Hugo site.

My process follows three steps: download the overcast.opml full export file, run a script to generate the Hugo posts, and run a script to grab extra podcast metadata like cover art.

You can find my scripts in this gist if you're interested in learning more, but they may not be that useful for anyone without my exact Hugo config.

You may notice in the scripts that I have a "block list" of podcast URLs I can add. That's because I wanted my listen posts to helpfully link to and embed audio whenever possible. However, some of the feeds I subscribe to contain private or for-pay content - particularly a couple of podcasts I support on Patreon. I do want to track my listening habits for these podcasts, so I will likely start handling them differently by leaving out the embedded audio and linking directly to Patreon pages where possible.

Running the script, I was able to happily show everything I listened to as just another type of post on my site. However, it turns out I had (and keep making) a lot of listen posts. Visually they were drowning out all my other activity on my site.

So I have sequestered them on a new Listens page where you can only follow my podcast consumption history, keeping it out of my main feeds.

Similarly, I have been interested in having a nice Instagram-like page that shows off my photos in a grid. So I made a Photos page to show off those posts.

Both of these pages have microformats2 feed information embedded, so if you have an Indie reader, you might be interested in following just those pages!