Episode: 4318
Title: HPR4318: What's up with the dates on the HPR future feed in AntennaPod?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4318/hpr4318.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:54:31

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,318 for Wednesday the 19th of February 2025.
Today's show is entitled, What's Up with the Dates on the HBR Future Feed in Antenna
Pod?
It is hosted by D. N. T. and is about 7 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, the HBR Future Feed doesn't show dates properly.
What's up with that?
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Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is your host D. N. T.
Now this one, I'm not convinced it was really a good episode of Hacker Public Radio,
but Dave Morris on the Matrix channel said that it could be, but they say that all the
time, you know, pretty much anything you say someone is going to say, oh, it should
be an episode.
But anyway, I will record it and you can tell me.
So yeah, it was Antenna Pod, right?
Antenna Pod is the podcast, the pod catcher, they say, for Android.
That is open source and is very good and so when you subscribe to the Hacker Public Radio
main feed, you have the dates of each episode, the date that the episode comes out.
Even if you go and you subscribe today and you look at the past episodes or if you don't
refresh your feed for several days, each episode will come in with the date and they're
sorted by date and that's all good.
When you subscribe to the future feed, that doesn't happen.
For example, if I subscribe today to the future feed, I mean, if I refresh the future feed
today, all the new episodes that are there that I hadn't seen before will show as if they
had been released today, right?
Which is not true.
They may have been released actually a few days ago and also there is the publication
date for each episode that is in the feed file that it's there.
The antenna pod is apparently not showing it.
I was kind of puzzled by this and I decided to try to figure out why.
I took the XML file for each feed, for the future feed and the main feed and I just looked
at it and compared them and I saw that there was absolutely no difference between them
other than of course the name of the feed.
I figured well, so it looks like it's when there is a date in the future, right?
Maybe if there is one date, if there is one episode whose date is in the future, then
antenna pod says, okay, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
I'm just going to ignore his dates, right?
I mean, we're just kind of weird because if that weren't the case, then you could just
not show the future episodes, right?
But then of course, then I guess people who run commercial podcasts would not like that
because they wouldn't use that anyway because you would be leaking future episodes, right?
Who cares about that?
I don't know.
Anyway, so I looked at the spec for the RSS for RSS feeds and yeah, it says their pub
date is the property for each episode, is the date the episode is supposed to come out
and then it kind of says something like podcast, the players, RSS readers should or can hide
future episodes, right?
Future or future items in the RSS feed, whatever, or you know, you could imagine there could
be an option to hide or show future episodes, right?
Instead antenna pod decides to just like if there's one episode whose date is in the future,
we're just going to ignore all the dates in your feed.
And apparently the reason they did that, there is a link that I'll put in the show notes
is because people were using that to manipulate when, where their podcast episode appears
to people.
Not sure what that, how that would work because I would think generally your episode is going
to be in the past, I mean, it's going to order by oldest first, right?
So that would actually push your episode to the end of the list.
If you had your episodes mixed in with other podcast episodes from other podcasts, anyway,
I don't understand why that would have happened.
And it's actually even, honestly, I would think it would be interesting to have let the
episodes in the future show in the app, because then you could have like sort of like a
pinned episode, right?
You could kind of repurpose that to pin an episode to the top of your show list, right?
When somebody, like say somebody subscribing to Hacker Public Radio, you would be able
to control exactly what episode will appear at the top of the list to every new subscriber,
right?
By just setting a date far in the future.
But anyway, that's not how it turned out.
So the fact is that when there's a date in the future, then all dates will be ignored.
And in a pod, we'll just treat the date as the date it received the episode from the
feed.
This whole thing came out because I was suggesting that we drop in the podcast feed.
We have HPR and then the number of the episode.
And I was suggesting we remove that to save a little bit of space and let the name of the
episode appear first.
And that was in the context of somebody else suggesting we add the name of the host to
the episode title or the show notes, right?
Because yeah, you may notice currently the host doesn't necessarily appear in your podcast
app.
You often have to open the website to see who hosted a given show.
So anyway, that was that I hopefully this was a tolerable episode.
Thank you for tuning in.
Pick up a microphone and record your own show rambling on about whatever you saw or thought
about and we'll listen to it.
And come back tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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