Today, I’m thrilled to share that Spotify has returned Podlink to my care! After four and a half years, Podlink is back with its original founder, and I’m excited about what’s ahead.

In 2018, I launched Podlink to help podcasters share their shows ✨wherever you get your podcasts✨ In 2021, Podlink became part of Podsights, then Spotify, serving millions of listeners and creators. As I left Spotify in 2023, I immediately started asking about Podlink’s future.

In 2024, as I was building EpisodesFM, I continued to advocate for Podlink’s return, given my deep passion for the original platform. Finally, in 2025, the stars have aligned for Spotify to return Podlink to me, and I can’t wait to bring those improvements to a larger audience.

Spotify has been a fantastic partner in this process, working closely with me to guarantee a smooth handoff. I’m deeply grateful for their collaboration and support.

I’d like to express gratitude to everyone who’s trusted Podlink: podcasters, listeners, publishers, and creators. You are why Podlink exists, and I’m committed to keeping it a simple, fast, and reliable resource for the podcasting community.

As I return to Podlink, expect fresh enhancements, features, and improvements soon. Stay tuned for exciting updates in the months ahead as we strive to elevate the Podlink experience. Thanks for your support. It’s good to be home!

https://nathangathright.com/podlinks-next-chapter/

Podlink’s Next Chapter

In April 2021, Apple Podcasts introduced Update Frequency. Two years later, I wanted to revisit that analysis and propose a way to bring this feature to all podcast apps.

I sampled 2,200,746 shows and found 423,066 had set an update frequency, meaning the overall adoption rate only increased to an underwhelming 19%. However, if we break down the shows by date created, a different story emerges:

For shows created after September 24, 2021, 80% have set an update frequency, which is a massive improvement. Around the release of iOS 15, Apple Podcasts Connect made update frequency a required field, which makes it impressive that the adoption is anything less than 100%.

But what options are they selecting?
1. Weekly: 54%
2. Daily: 15%
3. Biweekly: 10%
4. Monthly: 8%

However, these selections only represent the intended release cadence. What if we look at the release dates for every show with an Update Frequency, and take an average?

Apps like Overcast and Pocket Casts look at past episodes’ release dates to estimate release frequencies. Still, podcasters have difficulty maintaining predictable release schedules, precisely when these algorithms need more information.

Without additional information in the feed, these apps can’t predict the intended release schedule, especially for new podcasts with only a trailer or serialized podcasts nearing the end of a season.

 What if hosts gave podcasters a way to share their intended release frequency?

While the adoption of Update Frequency in Apple Podcasts has grown, listeners in all podcast apps should be able to evaluate a show based on a podcaster’s intended frequency. I’ve written a proposal for the podcast namespace. Read more about it here:
https://nathangathright.com/frequency/

Examining Update Frequency: Two Years Later

For everyone descending upon Dallas for Podcast Movement #PM22, the convention center doesn’t have a lot of great options within walking distance.

But you’d never know how many fantastic spots are less than 5 miles away.

Here’s a roundup of my recommendations for the area:

Coffee shops

☕ Weekend Coffee (Downtown, 1.09mi)
☕ Merit Coffee (Deep Ellum, 1.19mi)
☕ Houndstooth (Knox-Henderson, 2.52mi)
☕ Toasted (Lower Greenville, 2.45mi)

For such a quick breakfast, the fact that breakfast tacos aren’t a national favorite is a crime.

🍳 Taqueria La Ventana (Downtown, 0.79mi)
🍳 Tacodeli (Oak Cliff, 3.42mi)
⭐ Kolaches from any generic donut shop

In addition to La Ventana and Tacodeli, for regular tacos and Tex-Mex:

🌮 Mi Cocina (Klyde Warren Park, 0.54mi)
🌮 Vidorra (Deep Ellum, 1.19mi)
🌮 Federales Dallas (Deep Ellum, 1.39mi)
⭐ Trompo (Oak Cliff, 3.21mi)

If Texas BBQ is calling to you:

🥩 Pecan Lodge (Deep Ellum, 1.24mi)
🥩 Terry Black’s (Deep Ellum, 1.84mi)
⭐ Loro [Asian Fusion] (East Dallas, 1.59mi)

If burgers are more your thing:

🍔 Rodeo Bar (Downtown, 1.02mi)
🍔 Hopdoddy Burger Bar (Uptown, 1.56mi)
🍔 Rodeo Goat (Design District, 2.7mi)
🍔 Maple & Motor (Medical District, 3.28mi)
⭐ Knife Steakhouse (Lower Greenville, 4.13mi)

If you’ve got a sweet tooth:

🍨 Zero Gradi Gelateria and Dessert Bar (Downtown, 0.29mi)
⭐ Emporium Pies (Deep Ellum, 1.25mi)
🍨 Botolino Gelato (Lower Greenville, 2.82mi)
🍨 MELT (Bishop Arts, 4.6mi)

Categorizing bars is too hard:

🍸 Happiest Hour—0.9
🍸 Waterproof—0.9
🍷 Sixty Vines—1
🍸 Midnight Rambler—1
🍺 Rodeo Bar—1
🍸 Vidorra—1.2
🍸 Dot’s Hop House—1.3
🍸 STIRR—1.3
🍸 Harlowe MXM—1.3
🍸 Federales Dallas—1.4
🍺 The Rustic—1.6
🍺 Thunderbird Station—2.1
🍺 Cidercade—4.5

If you’re looking for more specific recommendations or want to hang out at @PodcastMovement, DM me!

https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id=13817002

Where to eat in Dallas at Podcast Movement 2022

Yesterday, Apple announced that you’ll soon be able to use an iPhone as a Mac webcam. If you want to hold your phone above a display, the current products are terrible.

If you don't want to wait, here's what you can buy today:

If you need a portable solution, I’d avoid attaching the camera to your MacBook screen directly. I’ve yet to find one that lets you position the camera at a flattering angle. Instead, go with something behind the laptop like the @switchpod.

If you’re looking for a more permanent solution, look into desk-clamping options like @elgato’s mounts.

I use the Camera Shelf from @hecklerdesign w/ my desktop monitor. Combined with their Tripod Head accessory, it’s a great option if you want maximum versatility to get the angles just right.

If you’re using your iPhone as a webcam, you’ll likely add/remove it frequently. So get a @moment MagSafe-compatible tripod mount to make that easier. They even have a Pro version if you want to attach more gear like an external mic or light.

If you wanna be a little extra, try adding a @Moment fisheye lens to fit even more into frame.

Using an iPhone as a webcam

I moved to Chicago last fall and had my first chance to design a dedicated office for fully remote work. With a new job and a generous WFH stipend, I invested a lot of time into finding the perfect gear to improve my workstation, so here’s a rundown:

The desk itself is an Ikea IDÅSEN Tabletop attached to hairpin legs. On the desk, I’ve stuck with the boring Apple Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse atop a large Felt Desk Mat.

Under the desk, I have a bamboo mini cruiser skateboard serving as a footrest. The chair is a Herman Miller Mirra with Caster Wheels.

For a display, I’m rocking a VESA-mounted LG 27 Inch 4k Display on a Jarvis Monitor Arm as my primary display, and my laptop serves as a second display atop a Jarvis Laptop Arm.

I use a Shure MV7 mounted on a low-profile Elgato Mic Arm. I use an Elgato Wave XLR interface plugged into Sony Headphones to monitor my input without the annoyance of audio delay.

After years of waffling back and forth, I finally took the plunge and upgraded my webcam setup to a Sony Alpha 6100 with the Sigma 16mm f/1.4 lens mounted on a Heckler Camera Shelf. It's connected via an angled micro-HDMI connector and an Elgato Cam Link 4K.

During the day, this room’s primary light source is the large 6×6ft window. On the opposite side, I use an Elgato Key Light to fill in the shadows on that side of my face. 

A colorful LIFX Beam behind my chair corner serves as a fun backlight and always sparks a conversation.

After the sun’s gone down, the Key Light gets promoted to the primary light. A second LIFX Beam in the corner behind my desk takes over the role of fill light.

I was well on my way to a Twitch streamer’s setup, so I just leaned into it. An Elgato HD60 S+ lets me pass video to the display and capture HDMI signal for streaming. I have a PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and an Intel NUC connected to the capture card via an HDMI splitter.

Keeping this many cables out of sight can be a tall order. Everything’s plugged into a 9-Outlet Surge Protector mounted under the desk alongside a cable management basket to hold any AC adapters and excess cable length.

I’ve routed all the cables to a CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 Dock, which can pass everything to the laptop over a single Thunderbolt 4 cable. I planned out all the adapters, cables, and power requirements with FigJam.

This all makes it easy to swap between my work laptop and my personal machine without reconnecting a dozen peripherals. Given that I spend most of my time in this room, I’m pleased with how it turned out and glad I invested the time and money to tailor this space to my tastes.

If you want to buy any of these things, I’ve added all the links on my blog. Check it out!
https://nathangathright.com/chicago-office/

My Chicago Office

I wrote a brief history of podcast sharing, a request for Apple to users set a default podcast app, and some recommendations for how we can demonstrate demand by working around them.

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/nathang/issues/why-is-sharing-podcast-episodes-such-a-pain-1190754

Every time I hear, “find us wherever you get your podcasts,” I’d like to tell podcasters that reciting their domain name at the end of an episode would surely be the most memorable call-to-action, but the common convention would tell them to just say, “figure it out yourself!”

If you understand how RSS feeds work in blogging and podcasting, you can appreciate how odd sharing in podcasting sounds. Imagine if we shared blog posts like we share episodes, “Catch my latest post! Links below → feedly, inoreader, newsblur, or where you read blogs!” 

Even though most podcasts have a canonical URL for every episode, people understand that directing people to their web browser isn’t the ideal destination. The better experience is to direct listeners to their browser for audio, aka their podcast app. 

@nbashaw broke down the distinction:
with podcasts, RSS is the whole thing. Podcast apps are more analogous to “web browsers for audio” than text-based RSS readers because they are the beginning and end of pretty much all podcast discovery and consumption.
https://every.to/divinations/a-post-mortem-for-social-podcast-discovery

So if you can share a link to an article and it will open in the user’s browser of choice, why can’t we do the same in podcasting? Many have tried to no avail. People have been linking to RSS feeds by using the `pcast://` URL scheme since at least 2006 https://web.archive.org/web/20060720103801/http://www.twit.tv/.

In 2012, Apple released Apple Podcasts for iOS. iPhones didn’t let users set their preferred browser or email client. So it was no surprise when they began preventing third-party podcast apps from registering that URL scheme.
https://twitter.com/vemedio/status/248337065421443072

In 2018, @amarksteadman and @Brendanjuna launched a campaign to get podcasters to support a new podto URI. @SupertopSquid summed up the key issue with that initiative, “If it caught on, Apple would probably add support for it to Apple Podcasts and we’d all be back at square one”

Years later, Apple eventually let users change their default web browser and email client, but they haven’t felt the need to do the same for podcasting.

If we want to make sharing podcast episodes easier, we need to bridge the gap ourselves. I think we should work around Apple, demonstrate demand, and then pressure Apple to give users control over their preferred podcast app. Here’s what could be achieved without their support:

1️⃣ Extend pcast:// to support episodes

I hope we can reach further than past efforts for cross-app linking and support episodes as well as feeds. Deep-linking to an episode in several apps is a more laborious task, and that could motivate people to get on board.

2️⃣ Define a method to lookup any platform’s episode link
Presently, the vast majority of apps make it impossible to link to an episode on their platforms programmatically. On GitHub, I maintain a list of the URL patterns used by podcast platforms. 
https://github.com/nathangathright/podcast-platform-links

Many of these platforms don’t want to construct URLs dependent on values within feeds because they don't trust them to remain stable over time. To solve this, podcast platforms could agree on a well-known endpoint to request an episode’s stable URL based on foreign keys.


3️⃣ Give users control where we can
When Gmail for iOS ran into a similar issue, they added their in-app settings to give users control over their default browser, maps, and calendar apps.
https://share.cleanshot.com/tNztg2

Taking a page out of that playbook, podcast apps could recognize `pcast://` links in show notes and redirect them to their in-app pages. Podcast newsletters could store subscribers’ preferred podcast apps and use merge tags to tailor their links to each reader. 

Podcast websites could override `pcast://` links on iOS with something like the Podlove Subscribe Button for episode links and set a first-party cookie to store the visitor’s preference.

I built @_podlink out of frustration that the industry wasn’t making progress in tackling this problem. It’s been thrilling to see podcasters I respect adopt it as part of their marketing efforts. 

But it’s always been a stop-gap for a systemic problem that should be addressed at the platform level. The podcast landscape has changed significantly since 2018, and I hope Apple recognizes its opportunity to help the open ecosystem of podcasting thrive.

Why is sharing podcast episodes such a pain?

With macOS Catalina, Apple unbundled iTunes into dedicated apps for Music, TV, and Podcasts. One feature that didn’t survive the transition was exporting your subscriptions as an OPML file.

So if you want to move away from Apple Podcasts, how do you migrate your shows?

On macOS, you have to root around the system directories to locate `PodcastsDB.plist`. From there, you can convert it to an OPML to be imported into another app.

https://liujiacai.net/podcasts-opml-exporter/

On Windows, Apple didn’t deprecate iTunes. So the old solution should still work.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/itunes/9pb2mz1zmb1s?rtc=2&activetab=pivot:overviewtab

Apple Podcasts for iOS has never supported OPML import/export directly. Apple does offer developers an API to access the user’s podcast library from their app, but App Review won't look kindly on those developers for using it to siphon off users.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mediaplayer/bu22222

Luckily, there’s one app with access to your Apple Podcasts library that doesn't go through App Review: Shortcuts!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a44ed58733794312ae9ac21e0d686eab

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/NathanG/GnNbnVa

Exporting Apple Podcast Subscriptions

I was curious about the popularity of podcast chapters, so I asked @johnspurlock to analyze his data for the answers, and he delivered!

Only 1.22% of new podcast episodes provide chapter markers! Knowing the history of podcast chapters, I’m not surprised.
livewire.io/podcast-chapters-stats

Podcast chapters were shown off by Steve Jobs in the keynote introducing the iTunes Podcast directory back in 2005! So what happened?

For years, Apple Podcasts only supported chapters in their own proprietary AAC/M4A “Enhanced Podcasts” format. Given that most podcast files were MP3s, it didn’t take off. By Oct 2013, GarageBand would lose the ability to create podcast chapters.

In March 2012, @podlove_org released their Simple Chapters spec for including chapters in the RSS feed. This made it easier for apps to support without parsing the audio file. However, support for creating these chapters hasn’t spread much beyond Podlove’s own publishing tools.

By Apr 2017, the Fraunhofer Society’s MP3 patents expired, and we started getting more tools to generate MP3 chapters: 
• Mac: @marcoarment’s Forecast, @AppChapters
• iOS: @wooji’s Ferrite
• Web: @auphonic, @BacktracksTeam

In Oct 2020, @PodcastindexOrg began advocating for a new <podcast:chapters> tag linking to a JSON file. Like Podlove, it needs support from the RSS host. With many new indie apps supporting this method, hosts have been more willing to adopt it in their feeds.

One advantage of ID3 Chapters is reducing complexity for hosts that support dynamic audio insertion. Hosts like @spoolermedia can update dynamically-generated audio files w/ chapters multiple times per day w/o having to update the RSS feed or external chapter files.

ID3 Chapters tick all the boxes, Namespace chapters need more player support, M4A/AAC Chapters have legacy support but not much else, and Podlove Chapters need all of the above.

And that’s how we ended up where we are today, with ID3 Chapters taking the lead. Namespace chapters have a lot of momentum. So it'll be interesting to see how their adoption grows over the coming year.

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/NathanG/0p9Jdpk

Podcast Chapter Popularity

Looks like Twitter is working on a Podcasts Tab. We have no clue what this will entail. What would you hope they’re building? Here's my wishlist for what I hope we get out of this:

1️⃣ Take the "Top Articles" idea and extend it to podcast links! This would aggregate up all the most-shared podcasts from the last 24 hours, and collect all the tweets from the people you follow.

2️⃣ Give podcast links the @TwitterSpaces’s persistent floating player! Today, sites like @OvercastFM have to use the video player, but that stops playing once you scroll away! Sites could link directly to the audio in the `twitter:player:stream` meta tag.
https://twitter.com/NathanG/status/1462809047481131009/video/1

3️⃣ Podcast call-to-action cards! If Newsletters get them, why not podcasts? (Although, this might be most confusing place to say "Follow this podcast")

Maybe they’re not planning to do any of this, and "Podcasts" will just be their hub for recorded Spaces, but we can only wait and see!

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/NathanG/S6Xb3Jn

Twitter Podcasts Wishlist

I’m in the middle of setting up a new MacBook. I’m so grateful to past-me for documenting all my little apps, tweaks, and scripts I run to make it cozier for me.

Here’s a thread of my favorite apps I can’t work without:

A clipboard manager and window manager is a must-have. Using a computer without them feels like operating with my hands tied behind my back.

In the past, I’ve used @alfredapp + rectangleapp‍.com, but I’m currently trying out @raycastapp for both of these needs.

macOS’s new Live Text is a good first step, but it only works on images in Apple’s own apps, which just is not competitive compared to @TextSniperApp and @cleanshot which let grab text from anywhere: YouTube videos, Zoom calls, un-selectable text across the web, etc.

The built-in screen recording tool is okay, but it pales in comparison to @cleanshot:
• record to .mp4 or .gif (not just .mov)
• record my screen + camera at the same time
• record system audio and microphone
• record keystrokes

The system volume control is a bit simplistic for my needs. It doesn't have Per-App Volume Control, Fast Input Switching, or Multiple Output Destinations. @RogueAmoeba’s SoundSource steps into that gap.

Working remote means I need easy access to Zoom links without opening my calendar. There's many good options in this category, including @MeetingBarApp, but my recommendation is @sindresorhus’s Dato

After installing enough of these apps, you’ll find yourself with a new problem: too many menu bar apps! The long-time king of this space is @macbartender, but people also like @_matthewpalmer’s Vanilla

I also highly recommend a notepad-style calculator. It's a great lightweight tool for breaking down multi-step calculations into variables and letting you explore different scenarios and experiment with numbers. Give @numiapp or @soulver a shot.