As I said in my post yesterday I haven’t been sitting still. I revamped the web site, moved my RSS feed again, added transcripts, and now chapters! Today I figured out the json file business as it pertains to chapters in the Podcast 2.0 namespace. It’s exciting to see them work in different podcast apps. Making chapters can be tedious but it is far easier than I thought and it can be done after the fact. You just need the entry in your RSS feed and when the file is created and put in the correct space the chapters magically appear.

The first thing I did was read the chapters spec on github. It’s not hard to understand. The problem is the pain in the ass of manually typing out all the code. It’s not even complicated code and you don’t really need anything more than a text editor. When you finish the code you save the text file with a .json file extension and it’s good to go. What I found to make the process easier is a json editor online. jsoneditoronline.org This free tool works in your browser and is open source. Here’s what it looks like.

The above image is what the code looks like. The attributes are empty. This is easy enough to use but it gets easier using the code in a tree format instead.

Using this interface completing the chapter information is as easy as filling in the blanks. You’re not going to have to worry about messing up the quotation marks or getting confused with brackets. This is stupid easy.

I upload this template, fill in the blanks for the attributes, save it as a .json file for that particular podcast, and include that in the RSS feed. If I have fewer chapters than I need I simply delete the extra chapters. By the same token if I need more I can just cut and paste empty chapters to the bottom and continue on.

Chapter functionality is on my last episode, Talking is Hard, and you can see it using any app that is chapter compliant. Check it out in Podfriend or the Breez app to see it work.

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