Subscriptions Suggestion

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Permalink Reply by Mike Sharpe on May 16, 2009 at 1:50pm

Under the Book cover in your Subscription page or The Book page is a some text saying COMPLETE or IN PRODUCTION.

Also your personalised feed also gets "You have reached the Author in this Book." Message or The one that is Tagged "The End."

I don't use iTunes at all, so I can't say much about the PodioBooks collection.

There is a Policy that removes a Pod-faded Book, but that does take some time to kick in.

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Permalink Reply by Andy Dillbeck on May 16, 2009 at 6:12pm

I know about the complete and in-production stuff, and I know about the reached the author message.

What I'm saying is that in the script that creates the personalized feed xml for the pod catcher, it would be easy to put something like

if(subscription(i)->BookComplete()){
return subscriptionXML();
}

Or something to that effect. basically, as it is outputting all the subscribed books, it checks each one to see if it's status is marked competed, and then includes it or not.

Just a suggestion for a feature I'd use. The alternative I've found is to just ignore all in-progress books from unproven authors, and try to remember which ones sounded interesting so I can check up on them once in a while.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Miller on May 18, 2009 at 5:28pm

This is a cool idea. So...just to make sure I understand...you would subscribe and put the feed in your podcatcher. When the book is complete, it would automagically start downloading. Sound right?

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Permalink Reply by Andy Dillbeck on May 18, 2009 at 6:30pm

Yeah, that's the basic idea.
Right now the options are one a week, one a day, etc.
Just add an option for On Complete, and as soon as the author uploads the last episode it puts all the info into the rss feed.

Or, basically what you said.
It would have the side benefit of giving you a better idea of how many people are listening/will be listening to the story, instead of seeing a spike on completion, since even if people aren't listening to all the episodes up front, they will still be subscribed.

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Permalink Reply by Evo Terra on May 19, 2009 at 8:23am

While the Lord Dread of Code figures out where to fit this inside his mountain of requests for change, I do offer a simple -- if inelegant -- workaround:

Subscribe to the Podiobooker blog.

Every time a book is marked as COMPLETE, I make a blog entry. Sure, some notices will be for blogs you aren't interested in. But if you're using an RSS reader, it's pretty easy to breeze past these. And it's not like several books are completed each week. So I'd think the tide would be quite manageable.

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Permalink Reply by Andy Dillbeck on May 20, 2009 at 5:55am

I decided to take your suggestion, but I had a little trouble, at first.
I did figure out how to fix it, but I wanted to let you know so that others don't have the same problem...

I use the google homepage as my reader, so I clicked on the add to google link on your blog page, which in turn took me to the add to googles add page.
When I clicked on add to google home page, it kept giving me a Information it temporarily unavailable.
the link pointed to
http://www.google.com/ig/setp?et=wpzJ0_Xw&source=ign_&url=/...

The way I was able to get it to work was to change it manually to
http://www.google.com/ig/setp?et=wpzJ0_Xw&source=ign_&url=/...
and presto chango it started showing me the feed.

[edit]
For some reason the forum is cutting off the whole link, so I just replaced "podiobooks.com/index.xml" which kept giving me a feed not found error on google, with "http://feeds.feedburner.com/podiobooks" and it worked no problem.

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Permalink Reply by Andy Dillbeck on May 20, 2009 at 8:23am

Hmm, maybe I am misunderstanding what a personal feed is?

I've mostly just subscribed through iTunes before this, so what I imagined a personal feed to be was basically a single rss feed (or subscription) that held all of the books that I was subscribed to on podiobooks.com

so for instance, lets say I'm subscribed to Great Moments in History and Fractured Horizion, my personal feed would display and download episodes for both books and get them as new episodes showed up (or on my subscription schedule).
Then if I go in and subscribe to Hutchens new book, those ones will start showing up in the feed as they are available.

Thats where a On Complete option would work nicely, because the user is already subscribed, and it's just a simple check of
switch(subsciption->deliverySchedule){
case "One a day"
... code here ...
break
case "On Complete"
if(subscription->status=="Completed"){
... output code ...
break
}

and the automagical stuff happens easily, instead of trying to figure out how to get someone to auto subscribe to it.

But from the look of it, the personal feed isn't much different than just adding each book individually? Or am I missing something?

Having a single feed of all my subscribed books would be awesome.
I have to many subscriptions cluttering up my podcast area in iTunes.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Sharpe on May 20, 2009 at 10:16am

Sadly, there is not a RSS Feed with all the books you subscribed to in one go, yet. (The guy to ask is Chris Miller) The Personalised Feed download it at your rate.

There is a OPML Feed with all the RSS feeds you can subscribe to.

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Permalink Reply by Evo Terra on May 26, 2009 at 5:43pm

Our personal feeds are book-specific, so you can say "Give me a new episode of How to Succeed in Evil (HtSiE_ every day, since the episodes are really short. But I only want to get a new Murder at Avedon Hill (MaAH) every week because those episodes are long." It takes two feeds to control that.

True, we could give you control at the book level that impacts your feed, but to what end? Do we not give you you the HtSiE episode on the day when the MaAH episode is released? By default, iTunes is set to only download the most recent feed, keeping the smaller storage capacity devices from overloading. If we released both on that day, people wouldn't get episodes without manual intervention. Personally, I don't do a lot of futzing with a podcast feed once it's been added -- it just ought to work.

There are other problems too, like iTunes nasty habit of overwriting ID3 tag information with info it gets from the feed. Since it's a master feed, some of that would lose the identity of the individual book.

Not that the idea is a bad one. As Chris mentioned, you've got him noodling. But I do think you're missing something from the way our custom albeit-book-specific custom feeds work today. It's that individual level of control on how quickly episodes of a book are released. And then just sitting back and letting your podcatcher do all the work. :)

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Permalink Reply by Andy Dillbeck on May 26, 2009 at 8:39pm

No, I get it.

I guess I'm kind of a special case. Basically I listen to audiobooks and other podcasts all day at work, plus on my commute, so I go through a lot of content. Not much music though...
My mp3 player holds a lot, so I always get all the tracks there are to offer at once.
Anyway, I'm glad that I could offer some suggestions and contribute.
I love your service, and if I ever get my own book written I'll definately submit it.

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