I have chapters!

more information. Last time I did anything was February 8. So we're looking at two months without doing anything, at least recording wise. But I have been doing other stuff. And what I'm talking about today is I have chapters, I figured out chapters. And I guess it's not such shouldn't be such a big deal. But it is for me, I did this just using a, an online tool. And looking at the podcast namespace spec. So I'm kind of happy with what I was able to find out without using really

another third party service. So anyway, I actually I made notes today. So let me get back to looking at that and see if I can stay on some kind of a track or flow. So I chapters is something that I haven't been able to, to even attack yet. I didn't understand them didn't understand what they were than I do. I don't even know what a JSON file is. But I wanted to figure it out. And the reason is, I did transcripts, transcripts were were easy. Again, I just make a transcript

of the audio. And you take the you take the file from that service at what service was it that I use? Let me think here. Let me go back. And look, it was suggested to me by Adam curry, the pod father and the tool was called otter voice. So it's otter.ai, Ott er.ai. There's a small subscription fee that you have to pay in order to make the transcripts, but it's not that expensive. And I'll go into that in another in another time. But I figured out transcripts and the previous podcast that I

made, has transcripts. Embedded and now also has chapters, I just finished chapters for that podcast the last time two months ago. And I just uploaded that file and implemented that today. And you can hear that on here that you can see the chapters now if you use pod friend, or breeze I've tried it in, in podcast addict, but I can't even find chapters for other podcasts in podcast addict. So I don't know where those are. But it's hopefully it should work in any app that is compatible with

chapters from the podcast namespace. With chapters now, it's when you look at the JSON file, it's it's fairly simple. It's just a bunch of brackets in text. So it's not, it's not that it's a complicated file to make. It's just seems like a pain in the ass to try to type out all these stupid brackets and attributes every single time. And so what I did was is I first the first thing I did was I read the spec on the podcast in 2.0. github. And that's why looking through that it's fairly easy.

There's not that much. It's not that complicated. Let me let me pull that up here. Okay, so you just have this, they describe it as that chapters object and it's a JSON file with two required properties of version and chapters. So and then it has other attributes like start time, author, title, podcast name, description, file name. And it's just, it's just some code that you write in a certain format, just like any other type

of computer code. So if you've Written, if you've done any kind of programming, this is extremely simple to look at. Yeah, I took computer science in college, and I've written C and c++ and compiled my own software, I sucked balls at it, but I did it. So things like like this and HTML, they're extremely, very easy to read. And this one's also very simple. It's just a pain to try to type in all these things with quotes and colons, and commas and brackets. And to make sure you don't forget the

proper bracket or, or comma someplace. But that's where I started, I looked at that and looked at the format, it's very easy. But what I wanted to look for, since I know it's a simple text file is I wanted to have a template and create a template where all I have to do is fill in the attributes have everything already there, of all the attributes that I want to use, already existing in a template file, and then just

fill in the information. So like, I could fill in the start time, I can fill in the title of that chapter I can, if there's an image that goes along with that particular chapter, I can just plug that in, or a URL, any of the things that belong with that chapter, I want that the chapter template premade, so then I can just enter them in. And I'll show you this metaphor, I'm gonna implement chapters for this podcast. And hopefully, if I do this, right, if you're looking at your podcast app,

right now, you'll see a picture of the tool that I'm using. It's called JSON editor online.org. And the picture that I'm looking at right now is the actual code part of chapters in it has the version number at the top. And then the next field is author then titled and description, podcast name, and then you start the chapters. And you can see in the code, where you put in start time, the start time is in seconds, which is another pain,

but I get that's how podcasts work is all all in seconds. So you have to do when you're when you're out there, marking your chapters, either by hand or making notes, when you want to have your chapters, you got to look at the timestamp and figure out the second. So it's just an extra step, which is not I guess that big a deal. But say for start time, it starts at zero, you have the intro, I can put an image there if I want a special image or just leave it blank, and it will continue to use the

episode image. But right now I'm going to do the chapter four, as part of the JSON editor online segment, I'm going to have that first image is going to show this code and it should, should be there right now I know you'll be able to see that. But with this tool, this online tool, it's free to use it's open source, what you can do is that look at it in this code format, you can also look at it in a hierarchical tree format, which

is even easier to read. And the attributes have just little boxes, you don't have all the you still have the brackets in there and the colons and the names of the attributes. But you don't have to look at all these stupid little quotation marks to try to make sure you're getting in between and not making mistakes, you just have boxes of the next picture that's that should be coming up now shows some of the stuff already filled

in. And this is for the previous episode, where I have the description and the podcast name filled in and the start time you can see here, it says zero, the title says intro and then you can see the blank box for image and blank box for URL. So using that online tool, all I have to do is click in there, put in the URL for the image that I want to use. And save it save it in in JSON format. The JSON format. It's really just a text file

with the file extension dot JSON. J s o n. So it's not you can even do this with a text editor like Notepad or there's notepad plus plus, which is better to use for something like this because you'll have different color codes for different types of text. But it's it turns out to be very simple. And you I use WordPress and I host my podcast files on my hosting company's cloud I guess you would call it it's in a just a folder on the same file system as my WordPress blog. And I just I'm using the

powerup plugin for WordPress. I have the episode mp3, a URL for that. And then once you put that into the power press plug in, you get the options for chapters. And for transcript, and in there, you just put in the URL for the files that you want to create. So you could even pre name them, or just leave them blank. If you leave them blank, then you can fill

them in later on. And then when a podcast, when an app, fetches that podcast and refreshes your RSS feed, it will pick up that information and the transcripts and the chapters will just will be there. So you can do it. Now before you publish, or you can do it afterwards. And doing it afterwards is extremely helpful for chapters, obviously, because chapters, you're going to have to go back and listen to your podcast again and find all the points where you need to insert a chapter or an image or

whatever it is that you're talking about. So it's very cool. And it's kind of exciting when you see it for the first time, something that you've created and put it on an app. And it's able to show all this information. But that's that's all I really wanted to cover today. I still wanted to keep this going, I'm gonna have, I may have to take another week off of doing this because I got other things that are happening. But hopefully when I get back so I may or may or may not have

another episode next week. But if, if I don't, it'll be like a like two weeks. And I should be able to hopefully, experiment more with this on a weekly basis and keep going. But this is this is to me very exciting. chapters are here I have them. It's a miracle. And that's it. That's all I've got for today. So let's cue the outro music and I'll have a chapter for that as well. Another episode in the can. Hopefully this one is more entertaining. I tried to be a little bit more

lively. But like I was whispering the last few times. Today, the excitement over chapters is over. Talk to you the next time when I return. Goodbye, everybody.