Save Your Work!
The internet never forgets? Not true. In recent weeks, we witnessed how established platforms can fall out of fashion or even get banned. Most of us probably also have witnessed content that was once free moving behind a paywall.
As a creator, I don’t always do a good job of saving a copy of my own published work and some of my stories have disappeared before I attempted to archive them. So, when one of my projects ended recently, I wanted to make sure I have a copy of what we’ve produced. Easier said than done.
For this purpose, I made a small tool that downloads an entire podcast. It works on Apple devices with the pre-installed Shortcuts app and with any podcast that has a traditional, public feed, i.e. anything that’s on Apple Podcasts is downloadable, but Spotify or Audible shows won’t work.
You will always find the most recent version on Routinehub. Download it by scanning the QR code or clicking the Get Shortcut Button. Run the newly installed Shortcut from the Shortcuts app and it will ask you which podcast you want to download.
In most cases, you’ll want to copy the show URL from Apple Podcasts, for instance https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-and-us-what-artificial-intelligence-means-for-our-lives/id1613534031. Make sure it has the id…. part at the end. Alternatively, you can enter a feed URL and the Shortcut can even try to extract the feed URL from a podcast’s website, so if you enter http://my-great-podcast.com that might work as well. Next, choose a folder, grant the Shortcut permission to do its thing and moments later (depending on your internet connection…) you’ll find episodes, episode descriptions and episode images downloaded to your file system.
If you run the Shortcut again a month later, it should only download new episodes and not re-download ones that are already in the folder.