Podcasting 2.0 - Episode 272: "Is this Y'all?"

00 - ️ THE SCHEMA IS LIVE — AND THEN THE AGGREGATORS PICKED A FIGHT

Dave has already told us this one is his: "Will explain in the board meeting tomorrow."

Mon 22 Sep — the cutover lands: "#api All api endpoints are now live with the new database schema. Bug reports welcome. I'm tired. "

@dave — all endpoints live on the new schema

Tue 23 Sep — and now the real work: "Now comes the post-deploy quality testing of the Index as a whole. Now that we have an audit trail for every feed we will need to walk every podcast in the Index to see where it stands and what metadata needs reconciling."

New tables in the dump: "@js There are new tables in the ndjson dump now. " · "@js You're the guinea pig. Let me know if anything looks off."

On breakage, to Mitch (Podverse): "Any additional parameters should be additive. The overall shape of the response should not change. There *shouldn't* be any breakage unless the client is doing a Rust style strict type coercion. But, I wouldn't expect that to be common since JSON is fragile."

Thu 24 Sep — the brawl, in four posts:

12:10 — "#api Adding 2 new indexes on the feeds table. Expect the api to choke for a few minutes until this completes."

14:38 — "#api All out brawl with the feed aggregators this morning. I'm about to win though."

17:08 — "Battle is over. The war is ongoing."

20:02 — "#api I fixed a huge problem with the feed aggregators. Based on this snapshot of our database metrics, can you guess at roughly what time that happened?" · 20:03 — "Network throughput up. CPU and disk rate down. It's a win-win."

The question for Dave: what were the aggregators actually doing — hammering the feeds, or something subtler that the new audit trail made visible for the first time? And what did the two indexes fix?

19:13 — the bug he flagged for today: "#api There was a problem with search ranking in the search/byterm endpoint after switching the db schema. This should be fixed now. Will explain in the board meeting tomorrow."

Loose end: @ChadF, 24 Sep — "@dave looks like podcaster wallet is returning the old node address." Not visibly answered yet.

Also closed this week: docs-api #160, "BUG: Wrong season number in some episodes" — season 14 coming back as 4.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

01 - GUEST: SAM SETHI — TRUEFANS, AND THE THREE FEEDS HE ASKED TO TALK ABOUT

He set this agenda himself. 22 Sep, to Dave: "thank you my friend. When are we going to get you back on PWR and equally I would love to come back on P2.0 to talk about SuperFeeds, Publisher Feeds and Network Feeds."

@samsethi — the ask (22 Sep)

1. SUPERFEEDS — what he has actually shipped

His own definition, 19 Jul: "Traditional RSS feeds were designed to distribute podcast episodes, with the audio attached using the enclosure tag. Then came Podcasting 2.0, introducing more than 30 new namespace tags… A SuperFeed lets you combine much more than audio or video. Alongside your podcast episodes you can include blog posts, publisher updates, events, premium paid content — all delivered through a single RSS feed."

The bit that matters for the Index: SuperFeeds started (Jul 2024)