Updates for September ~ December 2022

microfeed.org and more...

Hi there!

This is the 63rd full month (5 years and 3 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time.

What’s new?

1) microfeed

We just launched a new open-source project “microfeed” 3 days ago. It’s a lightweight CMS self-hosted on Cloudflare, for podcasts, blogs, photos, videos, documents, and curated urls.

It was a successful launch. Our GitHub repo microfeed/microfeed got over 1,400 stars within 3 days!

It’s (almost) free to use microfeed, in terms of money - you still need to pay for a custom domain name. But it’s unlikely that you’ll exceed Cloudflare’s generous free usage quotas.

It’s not free to use microfeed, in terms of your time. You’ll need to deploy the code to Cloudflare on your own. You spend time. And your time is valuable. This also requires some technical skills. You need to be patient enough to read the instructions first - nowadays, people don’t like reading texts; everything needs to be TikTok-able... If you are already familiar with Cloudflare, probably it’ll take 10 to 20 minutes for you to read the instructions & finish the initial setup.

2) you.com integration

you.com is a viable Google alternative. Now you can see podcast search results on you.com. Example:

3) demo.podcastapi.com

A podcast api demo hosted on Cloudflare Workers:

https://github.com/ListenNotes/demo.podcastapi.com

4) Added “Unique podcasts” filter for episode search

Sometimes, you want to know what podcasts publish any episodes with certain keywords, but you don’t care what episodes. In this case, you don’t want to see multiple episodes from the same podcast.

Here you go: “unique podcasts” filter! Example:

The “unique podcasts” filter also works in our Datasets product:

https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-datasets/keyword/

5) Upgraded to Python 3.11

The Listen Notes backend is running Python code. We just upgraded our Python runtime from 3.10 to 3.11. And we saw ~10% overall performance improvement instantly!

We could’ve made the upgrade earlier, but it was blocked by some 3rd party packages that had not supported 3.11.

The last blocking dependency was clickhouse-driver. So I created a GitHub issue in the repo. A few days later, the developer finally made clickhouse-driver Python 3.11-ready. Happy!

6) Misc

• Migrated help.listennotes.com to listennotes.help and switched from Intercom to Help Scout, which instantly cuts our monthly cost of hosting a knowledge base website by 50%!

• Migrated our internal chat ops tool from Hubot to an in-house webhook solution. It’s great to remove one more 3rd party dependency :)

• Launched a llamacorn website: llamacorn.listennotes.com, inspired by GitHub’s octodex.github.com

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Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or wenbin@listennotes.com :)

And Happy New Year to you!