Show IH: A directory of podcasts related to software development
Hello IndieHackers!
Mid last year I started listening to The Laravel Podcast and this led me to searching out and subscribing to a few more programming and related podcasts. I really enjoy listening to them, but quickly found myself running out of episodes to listen to as they are typically published monthly or weekly at best.
The iTunes podcasts directory was no good - the categories there are far too vague to be useful - you'll find tech news podcasts mixed in with development focused ones, typically pushing the latter well down the pecking order making them very hard to find. When I went in search of a specific directory for programming related podcasts, all I found were blog posts with lots of links. So I decided to build one myself.
Today, I launched the first version of ProgrammingPodcasts.com. It displays new episodes of podcasts as well as some popular podcasts on the front page, and you can dig deeper and explore by category or specific topic/programming language. There's a full-text search engine and so far the directory contains 201 podcasts, with just less than 21,000 hours of content on offer!
If the site gets some traction, I have plans to extend the functionality considerably. The first item on my agenda is to build a site-wide audio player that remains fixed while you browse the site. Right now when you play an episode, if you navigate away from that page the audio will stop. I've actually built this feature before for another project, so it should be straightforward to add. I'd also like to add some user-focused features, like upvoting, comments and custom collections and feeds.
I'm not thinking too much about monetisation right now. If the site gets traffic then sponsorship or advertising could work - the niche nature of the site could work well for very specific advertisers, much like those companies that advertise on the podcasts themselves. Another potential area for monetisation would be in offering services to those who publish podcasts - but again I'm not going to invest too much energy thinking about this right now.
I'd love to get the feedback from the IH community - both on what you think of the site itself and of any potential future features or areas for growth.
Some podcasts have transcripts on their websites. Perhaps you can write a crawler or pay pennies to someone to add them to your search index?
Or download all episodes, run speech recognition on them to make the contents searchable.
Thanks for the feedback, I like your suggested edit in your other post.
I like the idea of including transcripts, will need to look into how best to automate it.
Some podcasts include the transcripts in their RSS feed, and those will show up on the episode page - for example https://programmingpodcasts.com/episode/the-frontside-podcast/48-farewell-brandon - but unfortunately this is the exception rather than the rule.
Some of them provide a link to the transcript, I could try to parse this somehow, extract the transcript from the linked page and embed it, but it's likely to be tricky to get this to work reliably across all podcasts.
Running a speech-to-text process on all the audio is a great idea and if it's not prohibitively expensive (there is 602GB of audio so far) and works reliably that would be the route I'd take.
Thanks again for the valuable feedback and suggestions.
Looks very nice.
Here is my problem.
Tech changes so fast that I fear my skills will quickly get outdated. So I read HN, /r/programming, subscribe to newsletters, etc. Podcasts are a very useful additional resource.
But lately I've realized that programming is all that I read about and I have little to talk about to other people.
When I go to your site I'm like great! More useful info! But then I feel like shit because I realize I don't have time to listen to more podcasts about programming because I'm already trying to diversify my interests and listen to podcasts about other topics.
So I was happy to see
But it doesn't speak to me.
How about changing it to something like
and perhaps making it very prominent, in the header?
Because I don't give a shit about programming podcasts. I care about learning new things so that I can stay in demand, get a well paying and not boring job. Listening to programming podcasts is one way to do that. And there's many ways to monetize this fear.
If you want to monetize this, I would pay you to reach out to all of those podcasts and suggest I make an appearance as a guest