Seven Filters, Three Questions

By Junaid Ahmed

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I counted them. Status, Stage, Transcript, Guest Type, Origin, Season, Sort. Seven dropdowns across the top of your episode list, plus two toggles and a search box.

I built every one of them, one at a time, each for a good reason. Together they ask you to write your own query before the app will tell you anything.

And two of them overlap in a way I could not hold in my own head. "Status" is one thing the episode records about itself. "Stage" is something PodGlue works out from what the episode has. Both offer you "all", and the two "all"s do not mean the same thing. I wrote both and I still had to think about it every time.

Meanwhile the actual question a host has, standing at their desk with twenty minutes free, is not a query. It is one of three things:

What just came in. What is already out. What did I start and not finish.

What changed

Those three are now the first thing you see. New. Uncompleted. Published. Each with a live count, so quite often the number answers you before you click anything.

The seven dropdowns did not go anywhere. Season and Origin are genuinely useful when you need them. They just stopped being the first thing you see. They are behind the filter icon, now labelled More filters, with a badge telling you how many are switched on.

The definitions are deliberately boring:

Published is out in the world.

Uncompleted has been recorded and is missing a step. Recorded but not transcribed, transcribed but nothing generated, all of it done but never published.

New is everything else. Created, not recorded yet.

"Recorded" there means there is evidence of it: an audio file, or any transcript text, or you have moved the episode past recording yourself. Not the label alone.

Every episode is in exactly one of them. The three counts add up to your library. That sounds obvious and it is the whole thing. If the three numbers did not add up, you could not trust that clicking through them covered your shelf, and then they would be decoration.

The part I had backwards

Earlier this week I fixed imports landing in the wrong stage. That fix changes what new imports do. It does not go back and rewrite what is already in your library.

So I wrote a confident paragraph here about your back catalogue being rescued by the audio check. Then review pointed out I had the case wrong, and I did. An episode imported from a feed carries that feed's publish date, and a publish date on its own is enough to land in Published. Which is correct, and which happens long before anything looks at audio. Your back catalogue was never at risk of being filed as New.

The case that genuinely needs the extra check is narrower and much less dramatic: something with audio attached, no publish date, still labelled an idea. An episode you uploaded yourself rather than pulled from a feed. That one would have read as New on its label alone, and it lands in Uncompleted instead.

I am leaving the wrong version described here because it is the more useful half. Both kinds of episode end up in the right bucket, one via the publish date and one via the audio, so the outcome looked correct either way, and a story that produces the right answer for the wrong reason is one nobody checks. It took somebody reading the paragraph against the actual code.

One more from the same review: an episode with a half-finished transcript and no audio file was landing in New. A scrap of transcript is not enough text to do anything useful with, but it is proof a recording existed for somebody to transcribe. Those are two different questions and they are now asked separately.

What's next

Open your library. The three counts across the top should add up to your total. If they do not, that is a bug and I want to hear about it.

Trash is still its own thing, off to the side, not a bucket. Deleted is not a stage of work.

PodGlue is supposed to answer "what should I work on today" without you having to ask it in its own language. Seven dropdowns was me making you learn mine.