ITauthor

I was looking for an alternative to the SpringWidgets widget I used in a previous post, to put in the sidebar of this blog. The SpringWidgets one seems to need to load 100% before starting to play, which is no good because you've browsed to another page long before it's finished loading.

I came across EasyListener from Yahoo:
http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener

It's a free RSS reader/MP3 player that is incredibly easy to configure. It also set me thinking that what would be good would be, rather than just listing my own podcasts in the player, to offer a mix of other tech writing podcasts, or podcasts that tech writers might find interesting.

I investigated a few options, but by far the easiest way to do this, and configure it just how you want it, is to use Yahoo Pipes. The first half of this video shows how you do it:

http://revver.com/video/1245467/yahoo-pipes-and-how-to-merge-filter-and-sort-multiple-rss-feeds/

Here's the configuration I came up with:
 

As I'm writing this the resulting feed combines four feeds:

• Tech Writer Voices
• Grammar Girl
• A Way With Words
• The ITauthor Podcast

Yahoo Pipes takes the 15 most recent posts (except any where the enclosure is video rather than audio) and generates the following feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techwriterpodcasts

Note: The above feed actually comes from Feedburner, but it's got the same content as the one from Yahoo. I just dropped the Yahoo feed into Feedburner because Feedburner gives me a nicer URL and generates some nice stats about how many people download and subscribe to the feed.

When I put this feed URL into the EasyPlayer code generator, I get this:

A nice easy way to help promote other podcasts that you enjoy listening to and want to share with other people.

UPDATE:

OK, so you may have noticed that the embedded EasyPlayer widget doesn't work. It seems to be picky about which feeds it'll play with. It's fine with the RSS feed for ITauthor, but it doesn't like the output from Pipes - even though both EasyPlayer and Pipes are Yahoo creations and the feed I produced from Pipes is valid RSS (I checked).

So here's the same feed in the old, slow-loading, and uglier SpringWidgets player:

UPDATE 2:

My default browser is Firefox and, in Firefox, you can see a SpringWidgets audio player above. Internet Explorer, however, all I can see is a big white space. So my enthusiasm for audio player widgets has just taken a severe dip. I've messed around with both of these widgets for too much of my weekend, so I'm going to give up now. I'll maybe try again in a few months and see if I can find one that's less buggy.

:-(