I Clicked My Own Episode Link and It Went Nowhere

I've spent the last couple of weeks fixing what my newsletter looks like when it lands in Kit. Paragraphs, headings, a real button instead of a sentence with a link buried in it. All of that was worth doing.

Then I clicked the button.

What was actually happening

Every episode page on PodGlue only exists if a few things are true about that episode: it has to be marked public, it has to be marked ready to publish, and it can't be sitting in the trash. If even one of those isn't true, there's no page there. Not a broken page. No page at all.

The part I hadn't checked was whether anything confirmed that before building the link. It didn't. PodGlue would take an episode, build the address it should have (something like podglue.com/public/your-show/s4e12), and hand that address to the newsletter or the social post as if it were real. It never checked whether the page behind it actually existed.

I went and counted. Out of 1,188 episodes across my account, 1,143 of them would have gotten a link like this. Forty five worked.

That's not a bug in the sense of "occasionally the link is wrong." That's a bug in the sense of "the link is almost always wrong, and it always looks fine."

Why this one hid so well

A broken link doesn't throw an error anywhere. The newsletter still gets written. The draft still lands in Kit. The post still goes out on LinkedIn. Everything reports success, because building a URL always succeeds, whether or not anything lives at the other end.

The only way to catch it is to actually click the thing, on a real episode, and notice the page isn't there. I only found it because I happened to click one.

What it does now

Before PodGlue writes a link into anything, it checks whether that episode's page is real first. If it is, the link points there like always. If the page doesn't exist but the episode still has its own audio file, the link points straight at that instead, so there's still something to listen to. If there's genuinely nothing to send someone to, the line gets dropped entirely rather than shipping a dead link or some placeholder text.

I'd rather a newsletter mention an episode with no link than send someone somewhere that turns into a 404.

The part that matters more

The newsletter link was the one I caught by clicking a draft before it went out. The same exact mistake was sitting in the code that posts to LinkedIn, Threads, X and Instagram, and those don't have a "before it goes out" step. Once a post is live, it's live. I went back through the same logic there and fixed it the same way, and I'm not thrilled it took a separate pass to notice a social post can't be unsent the way a draft can be re-checked.

Running the numbers on that side: 45 links were already fine and stay untouched, 762 of the dead ones now point at the real audio instead, and 381 posts will go out with no link rather than a dead one.

What's next

There are two more spots doing this same thing on the client side of the app, building a link without checking it first. Same fix, different files, tracked separately so I don't rush it into the same change.

If your show runs through PodGlue, the links it puts in your newsletter and your social posts now get checked before they leave the building. That's a strange thing to have to say out loud, but it's true, and now it's actually true.