A JSON list of podcast hosts and a pattern to use in audio URLs
If you have the URL of a podcast's audio file, this JSON file will help you work out who the host is.
Each podcast host has an image, in optimised .png format. The filename is programmatically calculated from the podcast host's name, in lower case, with non-alphanumeric characters encoded as a "-". Here's our ugly code:
$imageFilename=str_replace(' ','-',str_replace('.','-',strtolower($host['hostname'])));
For now, the simplest way is to add to the file at src/hosts.json. Each podcast host may have multiple entries, but the URL patterns should be unique.
Each entry must contain the following properties:
-
pattern: a unique string to spot within the audio URL (more accurately, within the domain portion of the URL) -
hostname: a humanly-readable name of the podcast that this is hosted with -
retailer: a boolean showing whether podcasters can buy hosting on this podcast host (BBC isn't; Libsyn is). -
iab: a boolean showing whether a podcast host is able to offer IAB Certified Compliant statistics. This does not mean that all statistics from this host are certified compliant. -
hosturl: a website link (escaped) that links to the homepage of the podcast host.
Each entry can contain the following properties:
-
rss-pattern: an ADDITIONAL pattern for the RSS URL, to help with cases like LibsynPro which uses the same infrastructure for hosting retail and non-retail shows -
privacyhosturl: a link to the privacy policy of the podcast host
Podnews uses the below to extract a host's name in the "Information for podcasters" section in our podcast pages (example), and our podcast analysis pages.
$stmt = $db->prepare("SELECT * FROM `podcasts-hosts` WHERE (INSTR(:url,pattern) AND INSTR(:rssurl,`rss-pattern`)) OR INSTR(:url,pattern) ORDER BY `rss-pattern` DESC LIMIT 1"); $stmt->execute(array(':url'=>$podcast['audiourl'],':rssurl'=>$podcast['feedUrl'])); $host = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
Improvements are welcome. This list won't adequately spot original hosts via Feedburner or similar, but otherwise will catch most podcasts.