At the end of 2024, I wrote a post about creating a podcast feed manually (“by hand” or “hand-rolled”) as opposed to using the feed created by a blogging tool (such as WordPress). My example was a short feed of two audio essays by Ken Smith, a blogger friend of mine. Shortly after that, I wrote about Dave Winer’s idea of subscription lists for podcasts, and referenced my manual podcast feed. Dave’s idea was focused on being able to share a list of podcasts that could be imported in a podcast client, and that could be updated as the list was updated. For this idea to be implemented, someone would have to add a feature to a podcast client. I discussed creating standalone podcast feeds of episodes from other podcasts as a bridge. Users have the ability to subscribe to individual feeds, and a creator could update a feed with new episodes, publish the updated feed, and it would be available through existing podcast clients without waiting for some developer to “go first” with the subscription list idea.
Since then, I thought about curating audio from a public radio show (A Prairie Home Companion) within a podcast feed. There is a central site with an archive of many of the episodes, and there are a variety of interesting parts of the show that repeat across the episodes. One fun aspect of this show are the “commercials” from regular “sponsors” (like “Bertha’s Kitty Boutique” and “Powdermilk Biscuits”). I decided it would a good test of this idea to find all of the available instances of a particular commerical and create a podcast feed of those audio excerpts.
The one I chose was appearances on the show by Robin and Linda Williams, a husband/wife folk/bluegrass duo, and their band. They appeared as “Mavis and Marvin Smiley and the Manhattan Valley Boys”, recording for Do-Tell Records. One of my brothers helped with the research, and together we compiled a list of 17 excerpts. I created a website (MavisAndMarvinSongs.com) to provide a set of audio players for each excerpt, and created a podcast feed so that users could add it to their podcast client and hear the wonderful music for themselves. Enjoy!