I have a huge podcast backlog to get through and being a new user of Beeminder would love to use a service (through IFTTT) that forces me to listen to podcasts until they fall below a certain level. Anyone doing something similar or any veterans know how to make this work?
I’m flexible on podcast app to use.
There are two things to address in your question: Whether Beeminding podcasts is worthwhile, and how to do it efficiently. I can speak to the first:
December of 2014 into January of 2015, I used Beeminder to nearly halve my backlog of unlistened-to podcast episodes. My motivation was to be more caught up with current events. It worked well for me, and was one of the more fun things I’ve Beeminded, since I enjoy podcasts so much — “Sorry, honey. I’ve got to do this fun thing right now or I’ll be fined!”
I just entered data manually, though, so I don’t have any experience with integrations. (And for some reason I didn’t archive that goal long after I considered it hit, which is why there’s that long flat tail of no data.)
FWIW I use the Downcast app for iOS. I’ve enjoyed it for years, but recently it’s suffered from a growing number of bugs and seems like it’s being neglected. As far as I know it only stores data locally on my phone; it doesn’t sync to any service that could be used for an integration.
I have exactly the same motivation, a huge backlog of LSE Public Lectures
to get through, not to mention back issues of The Economist. I’m trying to
avoid as much as possible manual entry for goals because I
will.game.the.system.
I’ve started using Marco Arment’s overcast app. It’s got some synching option that I’ve not explored, but you may be able to hack something together on the back of that.
Update: I’ve just logged into my account, and it’s got a list of my ‘active’ episodes, which I’m sure could be slurped, counted, and used to update Beeminder. Could probably chain that together using Zapier. Equally, that’s a list that will grow as episodes are published, so be careful when configuring the goal!
May have just found a way, but will need to try it later on. Deezer allows
podcasts and has an IFTTT trigger for ‘New Played Track’. Depending on how
it handles podcasts it may see each episode as a new track, trigger when
played and then update a Beeminder goal.
EDIT: So looks like Deezer doesn’t count podcasts as ‘tracks’ also doesn’t allow custom podcast feeds to be added.