Giulio from the Cuba Libre asked about the flash player in our comments; is a good opportunity to talk about our flash player and why it is not ‘updating’. Let’s take his player as an example.
While it may seem like it we are using your feed to always show the last three episodes, it is not quite as simple as that. Once your podcast has been nominated and approved in the backend, it will appear in the category of your country. Every single one has an ‘information page’ with a flash player and a voting page where your listeners can vote for you.
One would think that it is very easy to just grab the feed, display it on the page and run from there. Oh only if that would be the case. :) In reality reading and parsing the feeds is a nightmare, which is why we choose to showcase three episodes of your feed rather than updating it all along. The moment somebody nominates you, the last three episodes are picked from your current feed.
Also, as not all podcasts are provided as mp3, we do download these three episodes so that playability is ensured. This is also why the 3 episodes stay fixed. Next year we surely change that or find that these flash players have become magically able to display all kind of feeds – we are aware that there is room for improvement in many areas. ;)
Why three episodes?
The EPA is not a podcast portal. We choose 3 episodes as to be listed on the player for another reason: Good podcast do update regularly and we think that your last three episodes will be typical examples of that.
Two kind of people will be voting for you: Your regular listeners, who do not need the player on our page and the interested visitor through the EPA which will want to have a look at what you usually do.
Use the direct voting link
You do not need the flash player at all, as you can just use the direct voting link for your podcast. Find your podcast, click on vote and copy and paste the URL from your browser. Or get more creative with it, see for example here, here, here, here or here.
Have you done something fun or interesting around the voting? Share a link in the comments!
