Your Old Episodes Were Filed as Ideas

By Junaid Ahmed

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You bring your back catalogue into PodGlue. Two hundred episodes, all published, some of them years old.

And PodGlue opens the first one on a page asking you to plan the conversation. Run of show. Questions to ask your guest. Recording setup.

That conversation happened in 2023. It has been downloaded eleven thousand times.

What was actually going on

Every episode in PodGlue carries a stage, the same way a show does: idea, recorded, editing, ready, published. The stage decides what the app puts in front of you.

New episodes start as ideas, which is right. You have not recorded them yet.

But an import is not a new episode. It is finished work arriving from somewhere else. It has audio. Usually it has an audience. The only thing it is missing is a transcript, and a transcript is where everything else in PodGlue begins.

The import was landing on "idea" anyway, because nothing told it otherwise.

Here is the part I did not expect. It was not broken for every import. RSS worked. If you brought a show in from its feed, it filed correctly. YouTube did not. Neither did anything else. One path had been taught the rule and its siblings never were.

That is the second time this week I have found the same shape in this codebase: a rule that lives in one place and quietly does not apply next door. I am starting to think that is the thing to watch for, more than any individual bug.

What changed

An import now lands where the work actually is.

No transcript yet, which is most imports? It files as recorded. You open the episode and you are looking at transcription, because that is the next thing to do.

Brought its own transcript, which YouTube sometimes does? It files as editing. You are past production and into the part where PodGlue earns its keep.

And when a YouTube transcript turns up later, because YouTube often makes you wait a few hours for captions, the episode moves itself forward. It does not sit in "recorded" with a finished transcript attached, which is what it used to do.

One more thing, which matters more the longer you have been using this: an import can never move an episode backwards. If you have already taken something to ready or published, re-importing the feed will not undo that. Your progress is yours.

What's next

This does not touch the episodes already sitting in the wrong stage. It stops new imports from landing there. Going back and correcting the ones already in your library is a separate job and I would rather do it deliberately than bundle it in.

The bigger thing I am chasing: your episode list still has seven filters across the top of it, and nobody should need to combine two of them to answer "what should I work on today". That is next.

PodGlue is supposed to know where you are in a show so you do not have to keep telling it. An import arriving as an idea was the app admitting it had not been paying attention.