I’m a Liar

Hi. My name is Allison. I am a liar. Before I explain why, I need to explain the backstory on how I learned I was a teller of untruths.

Pride Goeth Before a Fall

I started my podcast on May 13th, 2005. When I tell people about my podcast, I usually brag by saying I’ve been doing it for over 19 years without missing a week. If you listened carefully, you didn’t hear me say that right when I hit the 19-year anniversary of the podcast. I usually wait a few months because my streak didn’t actually start right out of the gate.

I did four episodes in the first 10 days, skipped June altogether, did two episodes in July, missed August, did 3 in September, and it wasn’t until October 2005 that I was consistently pushing out episodes every week.

I achieve this because of the kindness of people like Bart, Allister, and Jill from the Northwoods and a host of other friends over the years who have run the show while we’re on world travels. And let’s not forget to thank some AI-generated voices who helped to keep the streak alive.

The Longest-Running Show

While that’s a streak to be proud of, and while I was a pioneer in podcasting which only started in October 2004, the NosillaCast was not the first Apple podcast. That honor goes to my friend Adam Christianson, host of the MacCast. He did his first show on December 13, 2004, exactly 5 months before my first show.

On December 13, 2023, exactly 19 years after he started, Adam retired the MacCast and joined the Mac Geek Gab with Dave Hamilton and Pilot Pete. He’s a great addition to the show and helps keep the Mac Geek Gab at the top of my listening queue.

What that means though, is that as of May 13, 2024 when the NosillaCast turned 19, it became the longest-running Apple podcast. I double-checked this with Adam to see if he knew of anyone who started a show that was still going in between us, but he agreed that the NosillaCast is now the longest-running Apple podcast.

I was playing around with ChatGPT the other day, and I asked it to name the longest-running Apple Podcast. It answered:

The longest-running Apple podcast is the “MacCast,” which has been around since 2004.

I explained that the MacCast is no longer running and repeated the question. It answered:

Got it! In that case, another long-running Apple podcast is “Mac OS Ken,” which has been delivering daily Apple news since 2005.

I was pretty sure my friend Ken started after me, but I double-checked at macosken.com/…, and on his about page, it says:

Since May of 2005, Ken Ray has eaten, slept, and breathed Apple news and news related to Apple news in order to produce a daily Apple news show. Half of 2005 was spent doing that for someone else. Since late-January of 2006, he’s done this under his own flag, producing the daily show Mac OS Ken.

I explained this to ChatGPT, and finally, it came back with the right answer:

Ah, my mistake! The longest-running Apple podcast that’s still going would be the “NosillaCast,” hosted by Allison Sheridan. It started in May 2005 and is still going.

I have a feeling I could convince ChatGPT of any answer I wanted it to give but I was satisfied and my ego was properly stroked. But it got me to wondering why ChatGPT got it wrong.

It’s All About the Feed

I rolled the question around in the back of my brain for a few weeks, and I realized that I knew the answer. A hundred years ago, when mp3 players had tiny storage, we compressed our podcasts down to 64kbps. We were also told as podcasters to do everything possible to keep our podcast feed file small. It’s funny to think about now because it’s just a little text file that makes the magic happen, but back then every kilobyte counted. Based on this guideline, I made the decision to only keep a certain number of episodes in the Feed.

At some point in my podcasting journey, I made the decision to start allowing all new episodes to be in the feed. But because of my earlier decision, no episodes prior to September 16, 2018 were included in the feed. That could be why ChatGPT didn’t know it was older than the others.

This obviously must be rectified!

Fixing the Feed

I want to get every single episode into the feed file with the correct date so all 19 glorious years are represented. But how do I do that?

I started by just asking ChatGPT to do it for me. After a bit of conversation, it made it clear to me that this was something I could do through WordPress. I played around with WordPress and realized that I would have to do some machinations on the earlier blog posts for WordPress to be able to create the feed automatically.

The problem is that the earlier podcast blog posts are not identified in any way as being podcast posts. It wasn’t until January 2016 that I started having a NosillaCast category for those blog posts.

If I could get all of the NosillaCast posts into the right category, I could create a feed for the category, and then I should be able to grab the first 9 years of shows and tack them onto the existing feed. I don’t want to replace the whole feed with the auto-generated one because I’ve done a lot of work to tailor the episodes in the later years that would all be lost. I’ve done some testing and while it’s not quite working correctly yet, I think I’ll be able to achieve my goal.

But before I could add the old content, I have to manually categorize every single NosillaCast post from 2005 through 2015.

It was tedious, but whilst watching TV over a couple of nights, I successfully categorized a decade of blog posts as NosillaCast podcast posts.

Why the Blog Post Title

I entitled this article “I’m a Liar”. That was partly for comedy and clickbait, but it is actually the point of this story. As I was going through the first four years of NosillaCast posts to add the category, I discovered something appalling.

There is a gap between show 107 on July 29, 2007, and show 108 on August 19, 2007. In between those two shows are two blog posts about how much fun I was having in Italy! Evidently, I took two weeks off from the show that I never accounted for in my bragging about 19 years without missing an episode. It’s actually only been 17 years!

My only defense was that I had no memory of taking two weeks off, but I still hang my head in shame.

Maybe I just won’t mention it anymore or be much more hand-wavy about it, and point out I have the longest-running Apple Podcast.

The First Trabcast

While I must live with the sham that has been my claim to fame for all these years, it’s been kind of interesting doing a walk down memory lane going through the shows. I found one particularly delightful episode of the NosillaCast.

In July 27, 2008 Bart did his first stand-in on NosillaCast #162. I’ll finish this by letting you listen to the very young voice of Bart Busschots who seems to have a stronger Irish accent than he does now, introducing the first “Trabcast” as he calls it.