Moving Unfocused

Last weekend I was working on moving the podcast from one host to my own. When we first started Unfocused, I self-hosted it on a server using WordPress. It stayed that way for years—I don’t even remember why I decided to move it. Honestly, I forgot where it was hosted until recently.

In 2020, I switched everything to SimpleCast. It was a solid platform—about $150 a year. For that price, I could upload episodes, and it would distribute them to iTunes, Spotify, Google-whatever, and so on. It was easier than managing a website; all I had to do was upload a file, type in some text, save it, and done. With WordPress, there were too many menus and extra steps. I must have ditched it for a reason, but I can’t remember exactly why.

Now, I’ve come back. I didn’t want to pay for two website fees—one for whatever Collision28 is hosted on and another for SimpleCast. Plus, the podcast is on hiatus, so paying for something I wasn’t really using didn’t make sense. Instead, I created a subdomain for Unfocused Podcast under Collision28, set up a new WordPress site, and uploaded the RSS feed.

That part took all day. Podcasts need an RSS feed to tell podcast players where to find the episode, the title, description, and other data. But I couldn’t just copy and paste everything over. Luckily, WordPress has an import feature that reads an XML file and creates new posts. The only problem? All 300 podcast episodes had links pointing to the old host. Manually changing them one-by-one would take forever!

So, I used ChatGPT. Turns out, you can upload files to it! After a few test prompts, I fed it my XML file and told it: “Change all the URL links in each enclosure tag using the title in each item.”

ChatGPT spit out a new file with all the links updated in under 10 seconds. I imported that into WordPress, and everything looked good—mostly. The descriptions aren’t showing up, even though they’re in the code. No clue why. That’s a problem for another day.

For now, my next mission is to make sure iTunes, Spotify, and everything else point to the new website so I can shut down SimpleCast. If everything works as planned, listeners won’t notice a thing.