Stupid design online

[womzilla]

As I may or may not have mentioned here, one of the high points of my week is listening to the NPR "panel show" Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. It's an hour-long show which is broadcast twice over the weekend in these parts. However, in recent months I've discovered that I enjoy it more if I can listen to it without missing chunks--many of the best bits are over very quickly or build on material earlier in the episode. So I've taken to downloading it through the podcast, which is usually up by 7 PM on Sunday.

Poking around the website, I discovered something really dumb:

You can listen to the entire episode streamed from the website. Or you can sign up for the podcast and download it in its entirety. But you can't download the episode from a single link on the site!

This was doubly annoying because the streamed version of the May 27 episode was available on May 27. This The podcast didn't show up until today, June 1! This vexed me tremendously--I would have loved to have listened to it on Monday, when I had several long drives.

I'm sure there's a way to circumvent the streaming or step around the podcasting code and get straight to the individual files. But why should I have to work that hard to get something they're providing for free?

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I agree that that's silly and this is still a hack, but to save you some effort:

npr_waitwait

It's a syndicated feed someone made from the podcast. (Podcasts are just rss feeds that happen to link mp3 files.) Each of the entries has a link to the mp3, which you can right-click-and-save-as as you usually would.)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

That does, indeed, get me the direct link to the file--as does subscribing to the podcast through Bloglines, my rss aggregator. But why should I have to subscribe to the rss feed to get to the file?

The underlying problem wasn't the delay in the podcast feed (though I suspect that Bloglines picked up on it late). The problem is that the mp3 file of the complete show wasn't available until four or five days after the entire show had already been uploaded for streaming! That's just insane.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest opening the syndication feed in a text editor and grabbing the URL of the MP3 file out of it, but epi_lj's solution has the advantage of not being technical. :)