2

I use Firefox on Linux, and a Sansa MP3 player to listen to podcasts.

I use the Firefox bookmark sidebar, because it provides a very visually clean way to keep track of my unread podcasts. I move my podcast bookmarks between read and unread folders.

Recently I am using Feedly to provide notifications for most podcasts. But it is not as visually clean as I want, when I am looking for which podcast I want to listen to.

Firefox 64 has removed support for rendering RSS feeds, and clicking on my bookmarks no longer does anything useful. Previously, I was able to click on my RSS bookmarks and I would have a very visually clean way to download the podcast. In Firefox 64, clicking the bookmark just offers to download an RSS file.

Q1. Please answer if there is a Firefox extension which replaces the removed RSS rendering code.

Q2. Alternatives?

I suppose this is very subjective, because I haven't managed to describe

  1. Why exactly I preferred my "workflow" so much more than using Feedly directly.
  2. Whether I could accept changing my bookmarks to link to podcast archive pages, instead of the nice clean RSS renderings. One reason is that I use security extensions like uMatrix. Many modern websites do not degrade gracefully when scripts are blocked (or fail), so it was nice that RSS was so simple and reliable.

I am not ruling out Web-based software to track unread podcasts.

I am not eager to pay. The technical features that I am looking for are probably an unusual sub-set. I won't claim I'm not asking for very much :-), but I am sceptical that I'm describing a viable market segment here. So I would expect to be paying for software that mostly does something other than I want, and if it does meet my goals, it would be by accident, and hence difficulty to rely on.

I am only interested in podcast-specific software if I can manage the downloaded files externally.

E.g. I want to be able to save e.g. the 35 hours of the Twig audiobook, without being forced to use any specific software to find chapter X. In other words, it needs to save meaningful filenames for the podcasts that I use. In some cases the original MP3 URLs (or filenames) are too disorganized (e.g. Welcome to Night Vale), they do not sort correctly, so the podcast software should e.g. prepend a sequence number to the filename for sorting purposes.

I don't want to worry too much about which podcasts I want to save or not; I'm saving almost all of them (and deleting later).

Note I must delete read podcasts from the Sansa pretty much immediately, for UI reasons. So far I am perfectly happy doing this at the same time I copy files - I'm just using the file manager.

The software would need to be fairly efficient - quick to start, and simple to perform my frequent tasks. And not too visually cluttered. I can get used to a bit of clutter, if it means not having to deal with the visual clutter of a variety of different websites.

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    It's a somewhat different approach, but this might work for what you need: github.com/rss2email/rss2email. In essence, it scans RSS feeds and emails you all the new feed items since it last ran. It's pretty easy to set up as a cronjob or systemd timer, so you wouldn't even have to touch it much once you got it set up, you'd just get new feed items in your inbox.
    – Austin Hemmelgarn
    Dec 19, 2018 at 19:23
  • @AustinHemmelgarn thank you, that is really a great thought! It depends whether rss2email includes the link to the podcast MP3 (the "RSS enclosure"). If it just links to the article, it's not as convenient, and I probably still have the difficulty, where I have to guess which sigil is being used to represent the download link (if there even is one), and whether I need to permit javascript before clicking the download button will actually do anything.
    – sourcejedi
    Dec 19, 2018 at 20:58

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Please answer if there is a Firefox extension which replaces the removed RSS rendering code.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

I am very happy with it :-).

It is not quite perfect. It takes several seconds to render large RSS feeds. I have also found one feed that it is not able to parse.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.