It’s very very powerful.
You can even use the plus sign to add any number of tags together.
https://frontrowcrew.com/geeknights/tags/boardgames+conventions/
Does that get you the AND or OR of the tags?
It’s a plus, so it gets you AND. There is no OR. If you’re searching you’re trying to narrow down a list, not expand it.
So if these tags are only used for searching or organizing, and not in the URL’s of the podcast posts, you don’t need to worry about keeping the urls long term.
I don’t think you understand. Once any URL exists, it must always exist. For as close to literal eternity as possible.
It doesn’t matter what was at the URL. As soon as your web server returns something other than 404 for a particular URL it may never return 404 for that URL ever again. The worst case is you return a 30X redirect to another URL.
That’s the principle of cool URLs never changing. Strict adherence to standards and good Internet citizenship is, of course, the kind of thing that is hour highest priority.
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I’m glad your highest priority makes using the website perfect for non-existent hypothetical users, and almost unusable for people like me, a 15 year listener to the podcast who would really like to use the website as a resource.
Oh no, I mean the opposite. It makes me very sad your priorities are in this order.
It will be usable. I’m going to do exactly what I said above, with the tag alias feature.
Also so interesting that the tag mismatch is suddenly such a problem for you. That same problem existed on the previous website. Somehow you didn’t notice it at all for the past decade plus.
Why not try our excellent and vastly improved search function?
I found the old website almost completely unusable. I wanted to see if the new website would be better. I thought the tagging might be more useful. It isn’t. I reported the bug along with a few others as I thought it might be helpful.
To be clear, I have requested a single feature from the new website. Once it is implemented I plan on using it to listen to old episodes.
I don’t want a search feature.
I don’t want paginated displays of titles where I have to continually click “next page”.
I want a page with a single fully populated list of all Monday episode titles. I want another page showing all the Tuesday episodes. I want a third page of Thursday episodes. Sure, Wednesday too, but I’m not a comics or anime guy.
I want to look at the full list of podcast topics in one go.
I don’t want to search, because I don’t know what I particularly want to listen to in the moment. I want something to catch my eye, and I can relisten to an old board game review or hear a story about going to convention or a movie review.
Being able to sort the list would be a great bonus.
Let me give you a very clear example:
If I get that, I never have to click through pages after pages of badly tagged posts with janky formatting and cluttered-yet-information-sparse results.
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Can you tell me any other podcast, besides yours, that has such a page listing every single episode ever? Any blogs that have a unpaginated list of every post ever? This is a web site not a spreadsheet.
Is there any other person on earth who wants that besides you? I’m not out here making weird stuff on my web site to serve one person’s idiosyncratic listening patterns when there are more major bugs and features I have yet to take care of.
If you really want a spreadsheet of old episodes, I can do you one better.
Here’s the export of the database from the old website in SQLite format. That’s how the new site imported all its starting data. Have a ball.
For most podcasts, I can do this easily inside podcast apps. All the past episodes are listed in a single place. I can scroll through the entire contents of the RSS feed, see an episode I like, and tap to listen.
Here are some examples I’ve listened to from the very start of the podcast run
Numberphile, the feed goes back to 2018.
Omnibus goes back to 2017
The Incomparable goes back to 2010.
Geeknights is the longest-running podcast I listen to, and as you say in the podcast outro, it’s four podcasts in one.
How far can I scroll back in my podcast app?
Oh well.
The RSS feed only goes back to January 2022.
Before then, to find an episode to relisten to, I’m at the mercy of a website which is MORE difficult to scroll through than the RSS feed in my podcast app.
A scrollable list of all episodes isn’t unusual.
I made a specific page for my own podcast as a bonus for my listeners, and I get feedback all the time from listeners who find it super handy to see all our reviews of novels by a single author in one place, because it is sortable.
My most loyal listeners really appreciate the (tiny) amount of work it took for me to create the page, and I’ve happily taken their feedback to improve it over the years.
My podcast is a special case, sure, as I can include ways to search by author or star ratings and such that isn’t so easy in podcast apps.
But the use case of “scrollable list of all episodes” isn’t remarkable in any way. I have it available to me (in a podcast app) for most of my other favorite podcasts.
Except Geeknights. Geeknights is the outlier case in this regard.
I hope one day the website will help me, and all your other listeners, to have the same ease of access to your back catalogue as all the other podcasts we enjoy.
Here’s me searching for a name of a comedian in a podcast. It searches every episode back to 2012, immediately, right in the podcast app, with immediate letter-by-letter updating results.
This is not possible with the Geeknights feed.
Here is me looking for the earliest episode about visit Pax East
I’m now going to try it on your website.
Oh no. A list of episodes, but due to not having episode numbers, I have to look through every result individually to find the date. No way to sort the search output. Maybe the best result is on page seven.
Who knows? I’m never going to click through 7 pages to find out!
I’ll relisten to an old episode of the Incomparable instead.
It’s not about the time period, it’s about the episode quantity. Numberphile can go back that far because they put out fewer than 20 episdoes per year.
I limited the RSS to 100 items because while it seems whatever podcast app you are using can support more than that, there are other that will break. Others that don’t break, also have maximum limits on how many they will show. Users wouldn’t see them if I included them. Also, the actual size in bytes of the RSS file would be huge (relatively speaking), and it would take quite a bit of computing resources to generate it. Probably have to use a caching layer to avoid regenerating.
Even if none of those things were a problem, you really want to scroll 1500+ items on your phone like that? Ok…
If you want to go deeper with RSS, we do still have individual show feeds.
https://frontrowcrew.com/monday/podcast-rss/
For Monday this will take you as far back as 2017.
The web site also supports date-based query parameters that can help you dig way back.
And I just found a bug where those date based query parameters are not honored by the paginator. 
I know all this! I only have the last 150 episodes in my own main podcast feed too!
Performance on Wordpress craters with more than that, and I looked into caching years ago, but that was 2013 or something and I didn’t go through with it. Not sure of the reason.
In the end I rolled my own and made a static “Archive Feed” with all the main episodes from 1 to 500 for those who want it and have a podcast player that it works for.
And of course, I made a page where everyone can find all the relevant data. Including me. It’s invaluable to get an overview of past episodes while recording an episode.
I don’t want all 1500 episodes in one list. I want all Monday episodes in their own list, and Tuesday, etc. That will come to what? Less than 500 episodes each page? That’s in the ballpark of own podcast, and all the other podcasts I’ve mentioned so far that go back to 2012 or whenever.
Again, I don’t think I’m asking for anything difficult. I’m not a professional web developer and I made it work on my own website with only a few hours of python scripting, then some extra stuff with Wordpress.
“Just use search” is a terrible solution to a janky form of information organization.
Since Scott is a grump, here you go Luke.
Datasette is a web interface for SQLite files designed by Simon Willison, one of the Django creators.
Datasette-lite runs in your browser, and can load SQLite dbs from a URL, like Scott linked from GitHub.
Here’s the GN DB:
https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2FApreche%2Ffrontrowcrew%2Fmain%2Fetl%2Fdata%2Ffrc_old.db#/frc_old
If you want to view eg. only Monday episodes:
https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2FApreche%2Ffrontrowcrew%2Fmain%2Fetl%2Fdata%2Ffrc_old.db#/frc_old/podcast_episode?_filter_column=show_id&_filter_op=exact&_filter_value=1&_sort=pub_date&_sort_by_desc=on
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Ok. I’ll eventually make it easier to browse, not search, old episodes if someone else doesn’t make a PR for it first.
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The top of this box is asking to be clicked. Feels like show title or date should also link to the same place as Check It Out.
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Same same. I was already working on that.
Just going to note that our recent lack of shows actually has nothing to do with the new web site. I caught a cold, we had hockey games and hockey events, and a bunch of non-podcast-related stuff was going on IRL 
We should be live on Thursday and back to normal!
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Regarding the very important matter of chapter labels:
Are you sure you’re happy with the of the spelling of “Openey Bit”?
I can think of many alternate spellings that make more sense to me for this made up word.
Openy, Openny, or Open-y all seem more reasonable.