Podsend
https://podsend.herokuapp.com/ ← BackWhat is it?
A web app which processes the data from podcast RSS feeds and provides key facts such as how long the podcast has existed, what the longest ever episode is and the average time between releases.
Technologies
- »HTML5
- »CSS3
- »JavaScript
- »React
- »NodeJS
Background
Podsend is perhaps my most ambitious project to date and is still under development. At the moment it provides key facts about podcasts and presents them in cards and charts. In the future I plan to implement an integrated podcast player to allow users to listen to podcasts whilst they browse.
How does it work?
The Podsend homepage contains an up-to-date grid of the 9 most popular podcasts on itunes. The user can click on any of these or search for podcasts they’re interested in and find all kinds of information about them.
Under the hood
Podsend relies on the itunes search API and podcast RSS feeds for its information. The popular podcasts are retrieved from the itunes search API, as is the data retrieved when a user searches for a podcast. Once retrieved, an AJAX request is made to the specific RSS feed for the podcast and this is where all the data about the podcast comes from. Podcast RSS feeds contain the duration, release date, descriptions and download links for all the available episodes in XML. The XML is parsed to JSON via an npm module called node-podcast-parser and that JSON data is then parsed by my own JavaScript to produce interesting and useful information such as the average episode duration and time between releases. Some of this data is then displayed in charts via ChartJS.
Links
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