TWIG using megaphone.fm

TWiT Shows This Week In Google
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I have a very eccentric method of downloading and maintaining podcasts, it consists of various scripts and wget, run once a week. I usually run a couple weeks behind the latest shows; when I checked today I found the last two weeks of TWIG shows are now using megaphone.fm for distribution. I’m not happy about this, for a couple reasons:

  1. Downloaded files from megaphone.fm do not preserve the episode information in the filename. Previously (for years, and other shows) the filename would be “<episode#>.mp3”, which is useful in archiving and ordering of shows that are in queue; files downloaded from megaphone.fm are “<random#>.mp3” (such as “TWI6364779194.mp3”); its not very useful for information on a show based on the filename.

  2. megaphone.fm strips the “Last-Modified” header from the server response, which normally is the timestamp of the file on the hosting server. wget would normally use that timestamp as the “last modified” timestamp for the file; without that header, that timestamp is set to the date it was downloaded, not the date it was uploaded.

With these two differences I now have to run the show processing thru other methods, which annoys me; TWIT (and TWIG) has been fairly consistent over the years in maintaining its standard for its shows, and I’m disappointed that these changes are happening. I just hope it doesn’t spread to other shows as well…

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I’m sorry to say, it’s possible. Megaphone is a service that provides direct insertion of ads after the show’s release. We’re testing it on TWiG because we have so few advertisers on the show. But advertisers are demanding DI and we may have to extend it to other shows if it works.

I will address the file name and date changes with the team, however. That might be something we can fix. @PDelahanty can you address this with Megaphone?

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