RSS Feeds and You
Okay. RSS feeds, or Really Simple Syndication is the basis on which all podcasts are built. And they are dog shit and I hate them. If you are one of the many lovely people to be a member of any of our Sanspants+ Bundles the first thing you’ll most likely do is ask the question “fuck, now what?”.
Some of you will blindly start copying and pasting links to web browsers that will then prompt you to open up a podcatcher (that’s what the app you listen to podcasts is called and it’s fucking embarrising). Most likely it’s Apple Podcasts, sometimes it’s Spotify but maybe you’re different and have some other podcast app (I’m not writing podcatcher again, I refuse) because you’re different and special. Others will email us asking what to do, some will ask in either of the Discords (click here if you want to join the public Sanspants server) and a select few of you will be too overwhelmed, won’t say anything and continue to stare at your screen and just be happy you’re helping support your favourite fuckos. If you’re the latter, I love you. Never change. A rather large portion of you will be content to listen to the ‘sodes via the website in your web browser like some kind of maniac. I will never understand.
So for those of you that want to listen to our garbage using a podcast app read on, we can figure this out together.
For all our public shows, the best way is to just search for the name of the podcast in your podcast app of choice. There are links on the individual show page for the more common apps, but I believe in you. For member shows including all the ad free shows, you can find the RSS feeds in one of three places.
What you want to do now is add these RSS feeds to the podcasting app of your choice. A lot are the same and it’s a process of copying and pasting the RSS url and then adding your username and password when prompted. RSS feeds are a url. I didn’t mention that before. I am sorry.
Let’s take Plumbing the Death Star as an example. You’ll go to one of the three ways to get the RSS Feed and you’ll click the icon that says Subscribe via RSS Feed. This should copy it to your clipboard.
Now go to your podcast app, find out how to add an RSS Feed manually and when asked for the url paste that bad boy and fingers crossed it worked and it’ll prompt you with your username and password and now you can listen to all that bad content we have! Here’s what you’ll see if you use Apple Podcast.
Unfortunately, sometimes this is not where the story ends. Sometimes things just go wrong. Some apps won’t support private or password protected RSS Feeds. Spotify didn’t, it might now. I don’t know. You google it. If you’re having a tricky time, have a quick google of “podcast app you’re using” + “private RSS Feed”. Some will require you to alter the RSS Feed url so that it includes your username and password in a certain way. One trick we recently learnt was that the default feed has a / on the end of the url and if you added that to Apple Podcasts it wouldn’t work. So that’s been changed.
Speaking of, if you are a member of Bad Brain Boys+ or Imagination Adventures+ on Apple Podcasts, you might have the smoothest time of us all. Except sometimes a show doesn’t update correctly for 6 months and we don’t know until someone asks if that was intentional or a fuck up because we’ve built incompetency into the DNA of this company in such a way that some people don’t know if that was a deliberate marketing strategy or a genuine mistake.
Either way, RSS Feeds suck so if you are having trouble accessing shows, email us.
