Huffduffing for podcasters

I was pointed to this discussion thread which is talking about how to make podcast episodes findable for services like Huffduffer.

The logic behind Huffduffer’s bookmarklet goes something like this…

1. Find any a elements that have href values ending in “.mp3” or “.m4a”.
2. If there’s just one audio on the page, use that.
3. If there are multiple audio, offer a list to the user and have them choose.

If that doesn’t work…

1. Look for a link element with a rel value of “enclosure”.
2. Look for a meta element property value of “og:audio”.
3. Look for audio elements and grab either the src attribute of the element itself, or the src attribute of any source elements within the audio element.

If that doesn’t work…

1. Try to find a link to an RSS feed (a link that looks like “rss” or “feed” or “atom”).
2. If there is a feed, parse that for enclosure elements and present that list to the user.

That covers 80–90% of use cases. There are still situations where the actual audio file for a podcast episode is heavily obfuscated — either with clickjacking JavaScript “download” links, or links that point to a redirection to the actual file.

If you have a podcast and you want your episodes to be sharable and huffduffable, you have a few options:

Have a link to the audio file for the episode somewhere on the page, something like:

<a href="/path/to/file.mp3">download</a>

That’s the simplest option. If you’re hosting with Soundcloud, this is pretty much impossible to accomplish: they deliberately obfuscate and time-limit the audio file, even if you want it to be downloadable (that “download” link literally only allows a user to download that file in that moment).

If you don’t want a visible link on the page, you could use metadata in the head of your document. Either:

<link rel="enclosure" href="/path/to/file.mp3">

Or:

<meta property="og:audio" content="/path/to/file.mp3">

And if you want to encourage people to huffduff an episode of your podcast, you can also include a “huffduff it” link, like this:

<a href="https://huffduffer.com/add?page=referrer">huffduff it</a>

You can also use ?page=referer — that misspelling has become canonised thanks to HTTP.

There you go, my podcasting friends. However you decide to do it, I hope you’ll make your episodes sharable.

This was originally posted on my own site.