T w e n t y S i d e d
Another wrinkle in the adventure to get the RSS feed working: As I’ve said before, the only way to get the podcast RSS to do its job is to place a link to the show somewhere in the post. I normally generate the boilerplate stuff (like the media player you see below) using shortcode and it creates the links for me. But the RSS generator doesn’t see these auto-generated links, so it doesn’t know this is a podcast. To get around this, I must manually put a fully qualified link using raw HTML in the post body. That’s annoying and will cause chaos if the URL of this site ever changes, but fine.
But I also don’t want 2 identical links to the same audio file. (The auto-generated one, and the manual one I’m forced to add.) That would be confusing for the end user. To get around this, I make the manual link invisible by making it a single empty space. This means it isn’t visible to the user, which is fine since it only exists for the benefit of the dumbass RSS generator.
BUT!
The newer versions of WordPress have made the editor “smarter”. Now it sees an empty invisible link, concludes that’s a mistake, and then silently deletes it from the post. I feel like I’m actively fighting the system all the time like this, where I have to come up with workarounds to protect my other workarounds because the system is trying to do my thinking for me.
Sigh. I don’t know. Maybe the RSS feed will work this week. Maybe it won’t. I did what I could.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
This link exists only so the stupid RSS generator will do its job.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #264: Sethian, Satisfactory, Mailbag”
