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
- Why exactly I preferred my "workflow" so much more than using Feedly directly.
- 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.