“But dad, why doesn’t it work like my music app, can’t you just change it a bit?”

I originally built this website for (and with) my daughter to help her explore and keep up with podcasts suitable for her age. My son checks in from time to time but M definitely gets more from it. It’s pretty niche and she’s one of a (very) small number of visitors that stop by but she does seem to like it.

But man, she’s a little tricky with feature requests and what worked fine for her on her laptop just doesn’t cut it now she’s got a phone. The ask:

Can’t it just work more like a music app?

Which got me thinking, why can’t it.

Then comes a few evenings to a week’s worth of typing away after everyone’s down for sleep. Tweaking things, finding problems, scratching my head, then fixing them.

Audio cutting out when you swapped pages… something I didn’t think about because I listen to something and stay still, but not my daughter. So now audio follows you around the site and keeps playing, and it remembers where you got to when you come back (if you do).

The play controls are now more app ‘ish’ and the top of a podcast page has a much more unified feel, at least on mobile.

Did I mention things are awesome on mobile?

You should really check the site out there, because mission accomplished and honestly, I think this site really shines on mobile. Plus my daughter said she likes it, and that’s enough for me.

What else…

Gone are the millions of play buttons, which I think makes the pages more logical to use.

In comes a bookmark feature, and bookmarked row on the shows page if you join the site and log in.

URL’s have changed, so now the Shows live at /shows/moment-of-um/ and the Episodes sit below them at /shows/moment-of-um/what-is-the-strongest-glue/ (for example). It’s just silly to have the URL format as anything else. Though probably only I really care about that or notice it.

There’s more, but I forget. I should keep notes of what I’m doing.

Some things I still want to change are to add search to make specific things easier to look up, categorise the shows by age groups like 0-5, 6-9, 10+ etc. I also want to have a page making it easier to find podcasts by country in case people like that.

It’d be nice to start writing ‘best of‘ lists as well. We’ve checked and added 127 shows now, so things like Top 10 Episodes about Wombats are surprisingly achievable.

Almost feels like a proper website, I might have to start sharing it. I know M doesn’t read my news, so I’m just writing into the void, ha.