After looking at techpodcasts yesterday, I found another take on the idea of a podcast community today. Unlike techpodcasts, which is based on common content, this one is based on geography.
As far as I can tell, podcast con UK is trying to grow a community of podcasters located in the United Kingdom, and even plans to organize a physical meetup convention later in the year. If you are located in the UK, I suggest you take a look.
I was listening to Slashdot review and was once again reminded of ths potential for bittorrent downloading of podcasts. I took another look at iPodder 2.0, but there is no mention of bittorrent in the help or FAQ, and when I tried, it just seemed to download the .torrent files. Sigh. So, a bit of looking further and I found Nimiq (version 1.3.1), which bills itself as “enclosure ripper extraordinaire".
I must say that I found it pretty uncomfortable compared with iPodder 2.0 and Doppler. The first problem was importing my feeds from iPodder. Flush with my excitement about finally being able to export them, I attempted to load them into Nimiq. On the plus side, it understood the format. On the minus side, it insisted on putting up a little “import feed … yes/no” dialog box for every feed in the OPML. Worse, it just put up the feed URL, not the show title, so I had to try and remember which show comes from which URL. Worst of all, it made the computer “error beep” every time it put up the dialog, which was frickin’ annoying when I was trying to listen to a podcast while doing this. Grrr.
Let me make this clear. If I ask some software to import a feed collection, I want it to import the whole collection, with no annoying noises, and no “do you really want to import this feed". If I decide that I don’t want some of the feeds, I can either hand-edit the OPML before input (it’s just XML text, after all), or delete the feeds using the regular UI after import. I’ve only got about 50 feeds in my OPMLat the moment, but I’m adding them all the time, and doing anything on a per-feed basis without allowing multiple selections is a usability nightmare.
Once I’d got through the import process and calmed down a little, I looked at the feed list. In particular, I wanted to try out fetching Slashdot Review using bittorrent. While I was looking through the feeds and the configurations, I suddenly noticed that it had started downloading from a bunch of feeds. This wouldn’t be much of a problem, except that it seemed to be downloading from all the feeds, even the ones that I had already “topped up” using iPodder. Yikes! I had pointed it at my regular download directory, in the naive assumption that it wouldn’t download files that were there already. Apparently not.
I quickly stopped the downloads. But then I found that there seems to be no way to “cancel” a download, even if it is stopped.
On the plus side, downloading seems to be pretty fast, and nicely threaded, and it can add fresh downloads to a WMP or iTunes playlist, but the other usability issues place it behind iPodder 2.0 and Doppler for me.
YMMV, of course.
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