Keeping Podcasts in Sync is Hard

I had a tweet thread tonight as I was working on fixing The Bootstrapped Web adding their entire backlog to their podcast feed. It triggered an alarm on Audio Brevity that more than 50 episodes were added at one time.

A challenge that I have encountered with Audio Brevity is handling mass changes of a podcast. Sometimes it's not a big deal (such as adding a back catalog) and other times it's changing the GUID for all episodes... Imagine if suddenly I was re-summarizing all of Joe Rogan...

A hack I put in place is that if there are more than 50 new episodes found on a sync, then I just terminate that update and send myself an email.

Tonight I put in a flag that allows me to override the block if I've reviewed the change and deem it not a bad update that might create all sorts of duplicates...

...or more worrying (and costly) generating thousands of new summaries that I'd already paid for...and users getting duplicate emails...and yuck!

...and somehow I love these sorts of challenges... these spicy tricky no really good correct answer problems that have to be handled carefully...

Podcasts are hard

Arvid Kahl and I had a back-and-forth on this and it made me feel so much less alone.

Overall, I'm loving this challenge of figuring out how to keep hundreds of thousands of podcast synced and working cleanly for the people who use Audio Brevity.