Version news - v1.20.0 - Persistent playback rate

Hello dear podStation user!

Normally I would not bother announcing a feature that will be used naturally without explanations, but this is a feature that was asked several times in the past weeks.

Now when you change the playback rate (speed), it will be persisted, so that when you play the next episode it will use the same rate you set before.

Yes, this is a small version update, but I hope you find it useful!

Version news - v1.19.0

Hello dear podStation users!

This is hopefully a one of many future posts.
If you are reading this, you probably saw a notification on podStation and clicked on its link.

That is one of the new features I added (which can be turned off by clicking on Don't show this again). I plan to write version news posts now, specially when the feature is not so obvious to users.

Another feature included on v1.19.0 that you may have missed is the player option Pause when computer is locked.

If you lost a good chunk of a podcast because you forgot to pause it when leaving the computer, this might be helpful.

I hope you enjoy it, see you on the next version news!

Help me help you - How to collect information to report bugs

Some times it is hard to reproduce bugs reported for users, that is why I'm writing this post, to help you report your bugs more efficiently so that I can help you as best as I can.

Here are some steps.

Export sync storage

This will export all the data that you have in sync, list of podcasts, playlist episodes in progress, etc... 

Open podStation then right click anywhere in the podStation page and select inspect on the menu:

Now go to Console, type the command chrome.storage.sync.get((r) => console.log(JSON.stringify(r))); and press Enter.

Now copy the output to a file and attach it to the issue your created or e-mail.

Developer Diary #1

Hello readers, users, podcast listeners and fellow developers!

I have not been using this blog a lot, but sometimes I feel like writing about what I'm doing in podStation.

This posts will probably not be so interesting for regular users, but more for people who are interested on how podStation is developed as a piece of software.

I have not released significant changes for quite sometime already, and to be honest, I was not recently dedicating much time to it.

Recently I decide to tackle a nasty bug (some would say it is a missing feature) that have been bugging me, yep pun intended, for quite some time now:

podStation does not handle properly RSS Feeds without a guid tag in the episodes - Issue #41

Well, this comes with a lot of questions I have to answer some tricky questions:

• How do I refer to an episode that has no id? by title? by link? by publication date?
• What is the chance that this other fields are going to change?
• What do I do if with the data I saved in the chrome's sync storage if all of a sudden a RSS feed introduces a guid?

So this has lead to some developments:

1. I started to document the way podStation uses chrome's sync storage: https://github.com/podStation/podStation/blob/master/docs/STORAGE.md;
2. I realized it was about time (more then 2 years and 350 commits later) to introduce automated tests;
3. I started a major redesign, refactor and rewrite to unwire some nasty hard dependencies and allow for dependency injection and automated tests, which in this case means convert a lot of background page code to AngularJS services;

Now, this is all just going on, so I'll probably have to still invest a lot of time to finally fix this bug and have some good testing coverage.

Let's hope for the best...

A post mortem of being featured on chrome web store

Recently podStation was featured on the chrome web store:

I would like to share here what this meant for podStation in terms of numbers, mainly to help other chrome extension developers to understand what happens when you are featured.

Number of views on the Chrome Web Store page for podStation

Before being featured, the chrome web store page for podStation had around 170 visits per day.

During the period it was being featured, the number was around 5000 visits per day.

After it ceased being featured, it has sustained around 230 visits, but it could be because it was being featured in a subsection of the store. Here is the graph:

Number of impressions and installations

Before being featured, podStation had around 60 installations and 60000 impressions per day, 15000 total users.

During the period it was being featured, it had around 800 installations and 1.700.000 impressions per day.

After it ceased being featured it went back to normal installations and impressions per day, and it reached 20.000 total users. It is now going down a bit, but this was expected, as a lot of people probably installed it without knowing exactly what it was.

Number of active extension users

Based on the google analytics I have on the extension UI page and events, before being featured, podStation had around 750 users per day, going up to around 1350 during the period where it was being feature and receding back to around 1000 when the featuring period ceased, although I have to observe the next weeks to see if it will be sustained on the long run.

Why can't I mark episodes as listened on podStation?

I have already received this request countless times, in different variations: Implement a way to mark / hide / archive podcasts that have already been listened.

I would honestly like to have and implement this feature, but there is one main reason I will not do that (anytime soon):

Sync Storage size limitation - 102,400 Bytes - roughly 100 kB, even less then you could store in one of this:

This is the space podStation can use, per user and for free, to store data that is synchronized across computers using your google account.

I created podStation with one main goal: have a good experience playing consuming podcasts on a desktop, while synchronizing your data across computers (i.e.: Home PC and Work PC)

That is why podStation synchronizes for you the podcast list you subscribe to, your playlist and the position (time) of the podcasts you are listening, but it could not safely, within 100 kB, store the information of the list of episodes you have listened :(

I could store this information locally, but I don't feel that the feature would be complete if podStation could not store it on the cloud.

What are the chances for the future?

There is a thing called Sync Filesystem API, which would use space from your Google Drive account, but this API is only available for Chrome apps, not for Chrome extension. You can help by Staring this feature request here and leaving a comment saying this would be helpful, so maybe they will enable it for Chrome extensions as well.

The other option, in case I discover how to consistently make money with podStation, would be to implement my own server side storage.

v1.14.7 - Important update on collection of usage data and analytics

Hello Dear podStation user!

If you are reading this, you most likely have updated podStation to version 1.14.7 or above.

From now on, when there are important updates regarding podStation, it will open a blog post with the news.

This update is important because in a near future we will add google analytics to podStation, and start collecting anonymous usage data.

This data concerns only the usage of podStation.
We will not collect personal data, or anything related to the pages you visit!

For more detailed information, please read the blog post Anonymous usage data and analytics.

As we value your privacy, we understand this may make you feel uncomfortable.
Therefore, we are giving you the opportunity to disable this feature, even before it is actually implemented.

How do I disable the collection of anonymous usage data?

In case you want to disable the collection of anonymous usage data, go to the Options section, uncheck the box Send anonymous usage data and press the Save button.