Now that we’ve cleared the 1000 mark on the NosillaCast, I’d like to tell you about some changes coming to the podcasts. I promise you, they are all good.

The problem(s) to be solved

Of course, we have to start with the problem or problems to be solved. In order to explain the problem, I have to wind back time and explain how we got where we are today.

Back in 2005, I started the NosillaCast. Ok, you know that part. But one day, a gentleman named Bart Busschots sent me a comment. And then a review. And then another review. And then somewhere along the way we decided to start chatting on the air. He whimsically named our conversations, “Chit Chat Across the Pond”, because he’s across a very big pond from me. At the time, these chats weren’t a standalone show, they were part of the NosillaCast. Bart would first give us Security Bits and then talk about whatever suited his fancy for Chit Chat Across the Pond. My shows had been much shorter back then so having these little chats with Bart helped round the show out, and everything was dandy.

And then one day Bart got sick — too sick to do Chit Chat Across the Pond with me. Rather than have the show disappear, I started having other guests on with me. It was great fun but we all missed Bart. When Bart finally recuperated after many months, he said that he really liked hearing the other voices, and maybe it would be fun if he was only on Chit Chat Across the Pond every other week. And everything was dandy.

On April 14, 2013, Bart started the series Taming the Terminal. It was part of our Chit Chat Across the Pond. But Chit Chat Across the Pond was part of the NosillaCast. And the NosillaCast included Security Bits before Chit Chat Across the Pond. Are you starting to see where things stopped being dandy? Imagine you wanted to listen to Taming the Terminal Part 33 about SSH bookmarks. You’d have to go to NosillaCast #520, and then scroll through the audio from me, then the Security Bits audio, and only then could you find Taming the Terminal Part 33.

The Podcasts Started to Multiply

When Taming the Terminal completed in October 2015, afer 406 episodes of the NosillaCast, I finally spun Chit Chat Across the Pond off as its own show. This was a good time to cleave the content from the NosillaCast because Bart was ready to start Programming By Stealth. If you go back to that first episode, you’ll notice it’s CCATP #407, because I painstakingly went back and counted all of the non-standalone segments of Chit Chat Across the Pond!

When we completed Taming the Terminal, Bart and I rerecorded the intro without the Chit Chat Across the Pond stuff at the front, and Steve painstakingly restitched the audio together and made a sensible feed for Taming the Terminal to be a standalone podcast. Since it was evergreen content, it worked out great.

This madness continued, where the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed was super uneven. One week you’d have Dr. Garry on talking about how faulty our memories are, and the next week you’d hear Bart explaining how to use Mustaches in JavaScript.

At this point, we had the NosillaCast, Chit Chat Across the Pond, plus Taming the Terminal.

In March 2017, I decided to cleave the shows yet again. I wrote a post called Three Chit Chat Feeds are Better Than One where I explain the problem to be solved and announced three podcasts: Chit Chat Across the Pond, Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, and Programming By Stealth as their own shows.

To make sure you’re still following along, as of today, we’ve got the NosillaCast, Taming the Terminal, Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, Programming By Stealth, and then Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite and Programming By Stealth — both inside the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed. Every time I have to explain this to someone I struggle to make it clear.

Programming By Stealth Has Two Homes

Here’s another thing that’s been nagging at me about this mess that made sense as I built it but gets harder and harder to explain. Programming By Stealth has two homes. Every time we have an episode of Programming By Stealth, you’ll hear me on the NosillaCast telling you to go to podfeet.com to listen. But then I also tell you to go read Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

When you get to pbs.bartificer.net, you don’t just get the fabulous tutorial shownotes, you also get the audio embedded in the same page. And on that page, Bart points back to podfeet.com and the link I have to the podcast.

So answer me this: why do I send people to podfeet.com at all for this show? What value does it bring to the listeners and readers of Programming By Stealth? Why not just have pbs.bartificer.net?

Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite Takes Energy

Now let’s talk about Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite. Over the years it’s become more and more obvious to me that there’s one part of podcasting I seriously dislike. It’s the process of asking someone to be on my show.

I have to think up someone to have on, then I have to think up the hook to have them on — what will we talk about? What’s their “thing” that makes them interesting? Let’s say I’ve got a great guest idea, and I know what I’d like to talk with them about. But there’s still a hurdle. What time and date will we chit-chat? What if there’s a big timezone difference? What if they have a jobby job? What if we have to go back and forth 12 times to find a good time?

After having Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Dr. Andrea Ghez, followed immediately by climate scientist and geologist Dr. Jason Briner on the show back to back, I sorta did a mic drop on doing more interviews. I’ve done a few here and there but they take monumental energy out of me and I procrastinate about asking people on the show.

Non-Bart Weeks are Hard Work

Ok, we’re almost done going over the problems to be solved but I have one more. On weeks when Bart is on the show with Security Bits, I find that I have more time to enjoy my life. Technically I’m supposed to be retired, but on the off-Bart weeks, I have to work a lot of hours to keep up the pace! I keep looking for things to cut back on to give myself some actual free time.

The Solution(s)

After a thousand words explaining what bothers me about the structure I’ve created, I’m finally ready to tell you the solutions I’ve come up with. I should mention that there’s a handy diagram to explain all the changes if you’re a more visual person.

Programming By Stealth Will Stand Alone

The first solution is the easiest to explain. Programming by Stealth will no longer be part of Chit Chat Across the Pond. If you’ve been subscribed to Chit Chat Across the Pond to get both the lite content and the propeller beanie Programming By Stealth content in one feed, you’re going to have to subscribe directly to Programming By Stealth.

When you listen to Programming By Stealth, you won’t first have to hear what Chit Chat Across the Pond episode it is before hearing the Programming By Stealth title.

The links in the podcast feed will go directly to the episode on pbs.bartificer.net and there will no longer be a standalone blog post on podfeet.com. I’ll still tell you about the episode during the NosillaCast. No more bouncing around between sites to get the content.

This change makes my life mildly easier. I no longer have to double-post the same audio content to two different feeds and scrape off the CCATP name from the front of the title.

See? That first one wasn’t too painful and it makes a LOT more sense, doesn’t it?

Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite Becomes Chit Chat Across the Pond

One of the hardest things to explain (after Programming By Stealth) is why I have a show called Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite. How can learning about black holes be considered “Lite”? Since Programming By Stealth won’t be in the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed, now it can be the Lite version without needing to use the name Lite.

When I was rolling this idea around with Bart, he assured me that there was a relatively simple way to fold the Lite feed into the regular Chit Chat Across the Pond feed so that you wouldn’t have to do anything to keep getting your content.

I’m sure glad I had Bart to hold my hand while I did it. It’s not hard but it’s conceptually a mind-bender. The trick of this process is for my files to teach your podcatcher that the Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite feed has moved.

If you look at your podcatcher today, you should see Chit Chat Across the Pond where you used to see Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite. In fact, if you were subscribed to both feeds, you may see Chit Chat Across the Pond in there twice. You can safely delete one. What’s a little weird is you’ll see a bunch of Programming By Stealth episodes since the last time I posted Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite was back in late April. But after today you won’t get any new Programming By Stealth episodes.

For the nerds amongst us there were two steps to accomplishing this feat:

I needed to add a 301 redirect to my web server’s configuration file telling the podcatcher that if they came looking for the Lite feed, here’s the full Chit Chat Across the Pond feed instead. This is essentially the same redirect process I use to redirect you to, say, our Slack channel by going to podfeet.com/slack.

The second step was weirder. You get the podcasts in your podcatcher because of a small XML text file, also called the podcast feed. In that text file, Apple’s explains you need to add a tag that tells the iTunes directory that this is a new feed.

<itunes:new-feed-url>https://podfeet.com/ccatp/ccatp-rss.xml</itunes:new-feed-url>

While this technically worked, it didn’t work nearly as well as I originally thought. As I mentioned, if you were subscribed to Chit Chat Across the Pond and Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, you now have two copies of Chit Chat Across the Pond. In Apple Podcasts Connect, where podcasters manage their shows in Apple’s ecosystem, I also see two copies of Chit Chat Across the Pond. But it got even weirder.

I create my feed file using the application Feeder from Steve Harris of reinventedsoftware.com. I added that little new-feed-url to the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed file manually to test it out and it worked a champ. But then I needed to make sure Feeder didn’t override it and remove the tag. Steve told me where to put it in the app, but it didn’t work properly. It would eventually disappear. I have two Macs that both push and pull from Feeder, and I was working on both of them at the same time trying to find a pattern of behavior.

And then I made the worst possible mistake I could have made.

I put the new-feed-url iTunes tag into the NosillaCast feed, instead of Chit Chat Across the Pond and pushed it up to the web. Instantly, the NosillaCast disappeared from iTunes and then there were not two, but now three copies of Chit Chat Across the Pond in the Podcasts app.

I realized what I’d done very quickly, but undoing it was essentially impossible because this action erased the NosillaCast from Apple’s perspective. I had to recreate the show in Apple Podcasts Connect, which wasn’t difficult, but now iTunes says that the show started in 2024, instead of 2005! Hey, maybe I’ll get promoted under Top New Podcasts!

The really bad part is that every single person who subscribed to the NosillaCast through Apple Podcasts now has to notice, and resubscribe. If you subscribed through any other podcatcher, you should be undisturbed because they simply look at the RSS feed file.

You can imagine what a bad day I had! So let’s turn to the really good news!

Adam Engst is Coming to Chit Chat Across the Pond

It’s all well and good that I have two clean feeds now, one for Programming By Stealth and one for Chit Chat Across the Pond, but what about content for Chit Chat Across the Pond? Where will it come from if I’m so resistant to arranging recordings with other people?

Here’s the best news ever! Adam Engst has agreed to be a monthly guest on Chit Chat Across the Pond! Adam and I have a delightful time chatting, which I’m sure you have picked up on when you hear us talk about events like WWDC. He told me that he had been wanting to be a regular podcaster but knew that creating the shows was a lot of work. When I suggested he be on the show on the regular, he jumped at the chance.

He loves writing more than anything, and that’s what makes him the best guest. His terrific articles for TidBITS will give us a constant source of content for the show. His job will be to look back at his previous month’s worth of articles and choose one of them for me to read before we start recording. We get along so well that we can just flip on the recorder and go to town on a topic that he’s passionate about.

Adam being on Chit Chat Across the Pond doesn’t preclude me having other guests on the show but it takes the heat off of me to feel like I’m letting you down by not booking guests all the time.

Chit Chat Across the Pond Also Folds Into NosillaCast

If I stopped right here with the solution, it would all make sense. Three actively-recorded shows: NosillaCast, Chit Chat Across the Pond, and Programming By Stealth.

But I can’t just keep it that simple. One of the main things I wanted to do was figure out a way to lower my workload. This may be a weird idea, but I’m going to play the Chit Chat Across the Pond content in the NosillaCast too. Now the shows will be a bit more even in length – we’ll have Security Bits two weeks of the month and Chit Chat Across the Pond one week of the month, with one normally solo show.

Bottom Line

I hope this new arrangement makes sense to you and simplifies things. You still get Bart and Programming By Stealth with a more direct linkage to his tutorial shownotes. Security Bits will stay as part of the NosillaCast. You have two ways to get Chit Chat Across the Pond, by subscribing directly, or by listening to all of the NosillaCast.

And we get Adam Engst!!!