Tracking My Podcast Listening Habit

My effort to back up my social media activities involves Momento, an iOS private journal app that I wrote about in my last post. As the number of my listened podcast episodes over the years crossed 500, I wished to import my listening history into Momento as well. It was a cumbersome and convoluted process involving a lot of tools since there is no official way to do that in Castro, my podcast player of choice.

By emailing Castro’s creator, I learned that the app includes a hidden feature to give access to the underlying SQLite database for technical support:

1. Open the in-app Settings screen
2. Navigate to Support and long tap on Email Support
3. Choose “Email with Database And Logs” and send the email to my address

I then ran the SQL query below to retrieve all played/starred episodes and exported the results as JSON:

The output looked like this:

Notice that I linked each episode to its page on Castro’s server (see example). This came in handy as I later used Ruby to convert the JSON file to… Pocket’s exported bookmark format for use with Pinboard’s Import Bookmarks feature (crazy, I know):

I named the resulting file ril_export.html and fetched it to Pinboard:

Thanks to my archival account, Pinboard quickly imported the list and saved a permanent copy for each page.

Finally, I set up a RSS feed to the tag in Momento to show off my listening habit:

It was worth it.