folderblog 0.2.10: podcast download stats with OP3

· 2 min read

folderblog 0.2.10 adds one thing podcasters have been asking about: download numbers. If you publish a show with folderblog, you can now count how often your episodes are downloaded with OP3, the free, open-source podcast stats service.

How it works

Add one line under [podcast] in blog.toml:

analytics_prefix = "https://op3.dev/e/"

Every episode in your feeds then goes through OP3 in the form OP3 documents, including your show’s guid so OP3 can attribute downloads sooner. There’s no account to create. After a few days, your public stats page is at https://op3.dev/show/<your podcast guid>.

A few details:

  • It’s off by default. Existing feeds don’t change unless you add the line.
  • Only the feed changes. Uploads, the deploy’s size check and the player on your episode pages keep using your own address. That also means plays on your episode pages aren’t counted, only downloads from podcast apps.
  • folderblog podcast tells you whether stats are on.
  • Other prefix services work too, as long as the prefix starts with https:// and ends in /.

The My Azeroth Life podcast is already running on it.

Read this before you update

  • analytics_prefix needs 0.2.10 or newer. Older versions refuse a blog.toml that has it, so update every machine that builds the blog first.
  • If you used the old, undocumented op3 = true: it now means the same thing, and your episode addresses gain ,pg=<guid>. Podcast apps keep track of episodes by guid, so nothing gets downloaded twice.

Grab it

SystemCommand
Arch / Omarchysudo pacman -U folderblog-bin-0.2.10-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
Debian / Ubuntusudo apt install ./folderblog_0.2.10-1_amd64.deb
Fedora / RHEL / openSUSEsudo dnf install ./folderblog-0.2.10-1.x86_64.rpm
autonomix-cliautonomix-cli add https://github.com/ninepointlabs/folderblog

Already installed? Install the new package, then run systemctl --user restart folderblog. The packages and a plain tarball are on the v0.2.10 release, and the source is on GitHub.