Added live episodes to the front page

[ericpp]

Shows live episodes posted within the past hour on the front page of the website. Live episodes appear before recent episodes in the carousel and the user can switch between them by clicking on the normal left/right buttons.

This code makes the assumption that live episodes posted within the past hour are currently live. The API doesn't currently provide the live status or start and end times of live episodes.

[ericpp]

Hrm. The logic on this might be too flaky to use. The PC2.0 stream didn't appear in /api/episodes/live until after the show was over and the feed was updated at 2:30pm.

[daveajones]

What do you need to make it work better? More metadata about the stream from the API?

[ericpp]

@daveajones Adding the live status (pending, live, ended) and/or start/end dates to the /episodes/live endpoint would help to know which episodes in the feed are currently live.

Alternatively, you could add a status parameter to the endpoint, e.g. /episodes/live?status=live, to filter out anything that isn't currently live. This would also let me find long-running live podcasts like the 100% Retro show, which currently doesn't show up in the feed.

Also, what conditions cause datePublished or dateCrawled to be updated in the /episodes/live endpoint? The feed seems to be reverse-chronologically ordered by one of those items and I'm wondering why last week's PC2.0 didn't show up in the feed until after it ended. Does any change to the liveItem tag cause those timestamps to be updated or is it only for specific changes?

[ericpp]

No Agenda isn't showing up in the live feed today:
live-20221110133025.txt
noagenda-20221110133025.txt

EDIT: Now it's showing up as of 1:36pm today:

live-20221110133658.txt
noagenda-20221110133658.txt

[SpencerPearson]

I love this idea! Have you been having better luck with it lately @ericpp ? Would be happy to help test it, we go live tonight around 9 central US

[ericpp]

Hey Sir @SpencerPearson! Unfortunately no, I'm still hitting two issues with the Podcast Index API:

• Live podcasts take awhile to show up in the live feed of the API (roughly 10-30 minutes). (Bowl After Bowl went live around 9:32PM but didn't hit the API until 9:42PM)
• The API doesn't surface the liveItem status or the end timestamp to know when a live podcast has ended. As a result, the site will show LIVE PODCASTS for podcasts that have long since ended.

My current code works around the second issue by removing podcasts after an hour of being posted. The first issue would still cause confusion for podcasters who would expect their podcast to show up after going live.

[daveajones]

I'm working on solving this issue by including liveItem's in the normal /episodes/by____ response. Will update this when ready.

[ericpp]

@daveajones Excellent! That would let me show live shows on the podcast page as well.

[ericpp]

The code now checks the /episodes/live endpoint to gather all recently updated live items and then uses the /episodes/byfeedid endpoint to check which of those updated live items correspond to currently live podcasts. This approach seems to work, but can be slow (1-5s) depending on how many feeds it needs to check.

Also, the /episodes/live endpoint seems to return updated live items in descending order of id. Some podcasts seem to retain the same live item ids while others have new ids issued. This causes podcasts that retain ids to appear at the bottom of the list or to not appear at all. See: Podcastindex-org/docs-api#96

[daveajones]

@ericpp Ok to close this or are you still working on it?

[ericpp]

@daveajones I'm not comfortable deploying it in the current state. It needs a specific API call that returns live episodes based on most recent timestamp rather than id.

[daveajones]

10-4