Kevin Bae: I'm back. Like anybody's waiting for this to
start up again. And my audio is very, very hot. So what am I
doing wrong? Okay, let me turn that down a little bit. Maybe
I'm popping my PS.
Looks like it. Anyway, I'm back, trying to talk in a more natural
way. I sounded like I was whispering before. I don't want
to whisper but now, it seems to be clipping. Like, ever learn
how to talk on a microphone. Anyway, I'm here. That's Kevin
Bay, the podcast idiot podcast. And I'm back with a little bit
more information. Last time I did anything was February 8. So
we're looking at two months without doing anything, at least
recording wise. But I have been doing other stuff. And what I'm
talking about today is I have chapters, I figured out
chapters. And I guess it's not such shouldn't be such a big
deal. But it is for me, I did this just using a, an online
tool. And looking at the podcast namespace spec. So I'm kind of
happy with what I was able to find out without using really
another third party service. So anyway, I actually I made notes
today. So let me get back to looking at that and see if I can
stay on some kind of a track or flow. So I chapters is something
that I haven't been able to, to even attack yet. I didn't
understand them didn't understand what they were than I
do. I don't even know what a JSON file is. But I wanted to
figure it out. And the reason is, I did transcripts,
transcripts were were easy. Again, I just make a transcript
of the audio. And you take the you take the file from that
service at what service was it that I use? Let me think here.
Let me go back. And look, it was suggested to me by Adam curry,
the pod father and the tool was called otter voice. So it's
otter.ai, Ott er.ai. There's a small subscription fee that you
have to pay in order to make the transcripts, but it's not that
expensive. And I'll go into that in another in another time. But
I figured out transcripts and the previous podcast that I
made, has transcripts. Embedded and now also has chapters, I
just finished chapters for that podcast the last time two months
ago. And I just uploaded that file and implemented that today.
And you can hear that on here that you can see the chapters
now if you use pod friend, or breeze I've tried it in, in
podcast addict, but I can't even find chapters for other podcasts
in podcast addict. So I don't know where those are. But it's
hopefully it should work in any app that is compatible with
chapters from the podcast namespace. With chapters now,
it's when you look at the JSON file, it's it's fairly simple.
It's just a bunch of brackets in text. So it's not, it's not that
it's a complicated file to make. It's just seems like a pain in
the ass to try to type out all these stupid brackets and
attributes every single time. And so what I did was is I first
the first thing I did was I read the spec on the podcast in 2.0.
github. And that's why looking through that it's fairly easy.
There's not that much. It's not that complicated. Let me let me
pull that up here. Okay, so you just have this, they describe it
as that chapters object and it's a JSON file with two required
properties of version and chapters. So and then it has
other attributes like start time, author, title, podcast
name, description, file name. And it's just, it's just some
code that you write in a certain format, just like any other type
of computer code. So if you've Written, if you've done any kind
of programming, this is extremely simple to look at.
Yeah, I took computer science in college, and I've written C and
c++ and
compiled my own software, I sucked balls at it, but I did
it. So things like like this and HTML, they're extremely, very
easy to read. And this one's also very simple. It's just a
pain to try to type in all these things with quotes and colons,
and commas and brackets. And to make sure you don't forget the
proper bracket or, or comma someplace. But that's where I
started, I looked at that and looked at the format, it's very
easy. But what I wanted to look for, since I know it's a simple
text file is I wanted to have a template and create a template
where all I have to do is fill in the attributes have
everything already there, of all the attributes that I want to
use, already existing in a template file, and then just
fill in the information. So like, I could fill in the start
time, I can fill in the title of that chapter I can, if there's
an image that goes along with that particular chapter, I can
just plug that in, or a URL, any of the things that belong with
that chapter, I want that the chapter template premade, so
then I can just enter them in. And I'll show you this metaphor,
I'm gonna implement chapters for this podcast. And hopefully, if
I do this, right, if you're looking at your podcast app,
right now, you'll see a picture of the tool that I'm using. It's
called JSON editor online.org. And the picture that I'm looking
at right now is the actual code part of chapters in it has the
version number at the top. And then the next field is author
then titled and description, podcast name, and then you start
the chapters. And you can see in the code, where you put in start
time, the start time is in seconds, which is another pain,
but I get that's how podcasts work is all all in seconds. So
you have to do when you're when you're out there, marking your
chapters, either by hand or making notes, when you want to
have your chapters, you got to look at the timestamp and figure
out the second. So it's just an extra step, which is not I guess
that big a deal. But say for start time, it starts at zero,
you have the intro, I can put an image there if I want a special
image or just leave it blank, and it will continue to use the
episode image. But right now I'm going to do the chapter four, as
part of the JSON editor online segment, I'm going to have that
first image is going to show this code and it should, should
be there right now I know you'll be able to see that. But with
this tool, this online tool, it's free to use it's open
source, what you can do is that look at it in this code format,
you can also look at it in a hierarchical tree format, which
is even easier to read. And the attributes have just little
boxes, you don't have all the you still have the brackets in
there and the colons and the names of the attributes. But you
don't have to look at all these stupid little quotation marks to
try to make sure you're getting in between and not making
mistakes, you just have boxes of the next picture that's that
should be coming up now shows some of the stuff already filled
in. And this is for the previous episode, where I have the
description and the podcast name filled in and the start time you
can see here, it says zero, the title says intro and then you
can see the blank box for image and blank box for URL. So using
that online tool, all I have to do is click in there, put in the
URL for the image that I want to use. And save it save it in in
JSON format. The JSON format. It's really just a text file
with the file extension dot JSON. J s o n. So it's not you
can even do this with a text editor like Notepad or there's
notepad plus plus, which is better to use for something like
this because you'll have different color codes for
different types of text. But it's it turns out to be very
simple. And you I use WordPress and I host my podcast files on
my hosting company's cloud I guess you would call it it's in
a just a folder on the same
file system as my WordPress blog. And I just I'm using the
powerup plugin for WordPress. I have the episode mp3, a URL for
that. And then once you put that into the power press plug in,
you get the options for chapters. And for transcript,
and in there, you just put in the URL for the files that you
want to create. So you could even pre name them, or just
leave them blank. If you leave them blank, then you can fill
them in later on. And then when a podcast, when an app, fetches
that podcast and refreshes your RSS feed, it will pick up that
information and the transcripts and the chapters will just will
be there. So you can do it. Now before you publish, or you can
do it afterwards. And doing it afterwards is extremely helpful
for chapters, obviously, because chapters, you're going to have
to go back and listen to your podcast again and find all the
points where you need to insert a chapter or an image or
whatever it is that you're talking about. So it's very
cool. And it's kind of exciting when you see it for the first
time, something that you've created and put it on an app.
And it's able to show all this information. But that's that's
all I really wanted to cover today. I still wanted to keep
this going, I'm gonna have, I may have to take another week
off of doing this because I got other things that are happening.
But hopefully when I get back so I may or may or may not have
another episode next week. But if, if I don't, it'll be like a
like two weeks. And I should be able to hopefully, experiment
more with this on a weekly basis and keep going. But this is this
is to me very exciting. chapters are here I have them. It's a
miracle. And that's it. That's all I've got for today. So let's
cue the outro music and I'll have a chapter for that as well.
Another episode in the can.
Hopefully
this one is more entertaining. I tried to be a little bit more
lively. But like I was whispering the last few times.
Today, the excitement over chapters is over. Talk to you
the next time when I return.
Goodbye, everybody.