Podcast feeds you subscribe to by URL, including premium per-subscriber
URLs, with listings that are never cached.
Two findings shape the design. First, a premium feed URL *is* the
credential, and library paths are displayed, logged, and persisted into
saved queues and bookmarks — so the URL can never appear in one. Paths
therefore carry a slug of the subscription name plus a short blake3 hash of
the episode guid, and subscriptions live in rss.toml rather than being
addressed by URL.
Second, "not cached" has a client-side half: both clients cache library
listings by path and only /crabidy, /fs and /orphans bypass it. Without
adding /rss to those lists, a re-visit answers from the client's cache and
the server's freshness is invisible. A listing always fetches; a
listing-written memo (read only when resolving a track) keeps queueing 40
episodes to one fetch instead of 40, with no TTL to guess at.
Also picks feed-rs over hand-rolled parsing (RSS 2.0/1.0/0.x, Atom and JSON
Feed in one maintained crate — real podcast feeds are not uniform), and
records the risks that cannot be engineered away: publishers who
regenerate guids break bookmarks, and episodes ageing out of a feed cannot
be resolved. Capture rather than bookmark what you want to keep.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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