By Jason Snell

September 9, 2020 2:57 PM PT

Auto-posting the podcasts

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

Since Dan and I do a lot of tech podcasts in addition to our tech writing, a feature of this site since the beginning has been posting links to those podcasts. It’s been a largely manual process, recently augmented with an iOS shortcut that I built a while back.

But since we moved the site to WordPress, I’ve been hoping that we’d be able to find a plug-in to automate this process for us. Unfortunately, most RSS-feed-based plug-ins for WordPress are mainly targeted at people who want to build spammy websites that rip off other people’s content.

But Dan found the Podcast Importer plugin by SecondLine Themes, which seemed to do the job. However, it wasn’t quite what we wanted—you know us, we want it exactly the way we want it, and the plug-in didn’t quite fit the bill.

Fortunately, Podcast Importer is open source, and Six Colors reader Ryan Tvenge of Hoverboard Studios is a WordPress developer. Ryan previously helped modify the Memberful plug-in for WordPress to add in a filtering feature for our members-only RSS feed, and this time he made the changes we wanted to make Podcast Importer more configurable and filterable. In both cases, Ryan’s changes were contributed back to those plug-ins, hopefully to benefit other users.

With Ryan’s changes made and tested, our podcast posting is now automated on the server end. And Dan and I can reclaim that time and use it to write more articles and make more podcasts. Just in time for next week’s Apple event, no less.

Thanks, Ryan!

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