A Vote a Slate Hack

[owyn]

Needed a way to keep track of my Favourite Podcasts and give myself a checklist for voting at the beginning of another month.

This hack is best implemented from Foxfire, but, any browser which can automatically open all the items in a bookmark folder will do the job.

1) Create a new bookmark folder, eg. "Favourite Podcasts"
2) Go to the Podcast Alley Home Page
http://www.podcastalley.com/
3) Select a favourite show. Use search, or one of the top lists. Just need to get to the "See Details" page. eg. Coverville.
http://www.podcastalley.com/podcast_detail.php?pod_id=71
3)Bookmark the Details Page in the new folder

Repeat 2-3 for all your favourite podcasts.

Next month, when you are ready to vote.
1) Login to the alley
2) Go to Bookmarks, Right Click the new folder, and select "Open in Tabs" or it's equivalent.
3) Go to each of the new tabs, vote for the show, and then close the tab.

[seek3r]

Its going to be MUCH easier than this soon. And without need for any particular browser... altho everyone should be using Firefox anyways.

[owyn]

LOL. Chris mentioned that he was working on it. But I figured it was best to not say anything until he was ready to go public.

Looking forward to the "MUCH easier" way to do this.

[Brian]

As a test, everyone should copy and paste owyn's URLs from his post above into your browser, just to try out his excellent suggestion. Just copy and paste, no need to change any of the variables.

Just, you know, to see if it works.

:wink:

(thanks for using me as the example...)

[owyn]

ROFL.

But it's even easier if you are using Foxfire. Just right click the link and select Open Link in New Tab.

[owyn]

Hmmm. Interesting.

Not sure if this was available before, but, I noticed a Downloads(count) in the heading for Featured Podcasts Interview.

Keeping with the Coverville theme, I went back to it's interview and checked it. Clicked on download link, which brought up the Podcast Feed url page. Returned to interview page. Yep. Count had gone up by one.

http://www.podcastalley.com/featured_podcasts.php?feature_id=12

Hints of rankings to come.

PS: I am not pimpin for votes for Coverville, just being consistent with my examples.

PPS: Brian. About that cover request I sent in..... :twisted:

[theFerf]

Owyn:

this is not a real scientific method, nor is it used for ranking of any kind at this time. it is simply a script that adds +1 to the download count every time clicks on the link to subscribe to a podcast.

We will be working on a feature like this in the future, but it will not work as simply as the current one does (probably will require sessioins, etc). For right now, it is just for my personal use, and for people like you who find it :D

[seek3r]

Its not exactly what it seems. Just a count to track how many look at the feed url.

For better tracking we have features a'comin

One thing we cant seem to solve is how to actually track downloads of mp3's
The reason is that the podcast clients dont support redirects of the enclosure url location. If they did, then we could have an rss feed that has the enclosure url point to a page on podcastalley.com and passes it an id number of some sort. Then we could record the request and do a simple 302 redirect to the proper location.

But at this stage it just doesnt work in the clients, so its not something that can be done.
Also, its easy to inflate the counts of this by just requesting the id over and over again, and its not something we can solve with email validation and such, so its not something I would think would be great for "ranking".

[owyn]

:oops:
I am insatiably curious. When something catchs my attention I have to check into it or it will bug me for the rest of the day.

Keep up the good work. And heaven forbid that you should be caught doing anything unscientific.