I Kept Clicking Into the Wrong Episode

I created an episode from a booking last week and PodGlue took me to a different episode. Not a blank page, not an error. A real episode, from months ago, sitting there like I'd asked for it.

I did it again. Same thing.

What was going on

Every episode has an address made from its season and episode number. Season 8, episode 89 becomes s8e89. That's what sits in the URL, and it's how PodGlue finds the episode when you click a link.

The problem is what happens when an episode doesn't have a number yet.

When you create an episode from a booking, there's no way to know its number. It hasn't been recorded. In my case there are episodes sitting on my drive waiting to be published, so the number isn't even a matter of counting what's in the app, it depends on a queue that exists nowhere but my head and my hard drive.

Nobody had ever answered that question in the code, so the database answered it: season 1, episode 1.

Not as a guess. As a fact. Every episode created without a number confidently claimed to be the first episode of season one. On my show, dozens of them did.

So they all had the same address. And when the app went looking for s1e1, it grabbed whichever one it found first, which was basically never the one I'd just made.

The bit I keep thinking about

The database wasn't broken. It did exactly what it was configured to do.

Somewhere, a long time ago, someone set the default for those columns to 1. That's a reasonable-looking choice. It means a new episode has something rather than nothing. It looks tidy.

But "1" isn't a neutral placeholder. It's a claim. And leaving the field alone wasn't leaving it blank, it was asserting something specific and wrong, over and over, silently, for as long as the feature had existed.

The fix isn't a better guess. It's letting the record say "I don't know yet." An episode without a number now identifies itself by its own unique id instead of borrowing an address that belongs to something else. The moment you give it a real number, it goes back to s8e89 like normal.

I also went back and cleaned up 23 episodes that were already stuck claiming to be episode one. Carefully, one of them, E101 - Queen Bee from April 2018, genuinely is my first episode. That one kept its number.

What's next

Right now you still number an episode after the fact. I'd like the create screen to just ask, so if you know it's episode 90, you say so once and move on.

But that's a nicety. The thing that mattered was this: a link should open the thing it names. That part works now.