Bootstrapped.fm, episode 69

In this episode:

Hating snow blowers, BaconBiz, going to the gym, driving to places you should be flying to, Rocket League, Quintu, Scribbleton, profit-generating companies and VC backing, seeing the path of a company as an outsider, favorite songs.

Download the episode

Thanks to Linode for sponsoring! Sign up today and get $20 off.

2 Likes

I do not use iTunes. I recently noticed that I wasn’t getting any new episodes of the podcast. When I dug into what was happening with my Python-based podcast downloader, it looks like you changed the service you use to host your podcast downloads, and it is responding with a 403 - Forbidden error when trying to download using the Python urllib2 library.

When I changed my program from:

item_file = urllib2.urlopen(item)

to:

req = urllib2.Request(item, headers={'User-Agent' : "Magic Browser"}) 
item_file = urllib2.urlopen(req)

It started working again, which suggests to me that your service is blocking the default user agent used by urllib2.

Any thoughts on this?

Why would a service which is meant to facilitate file downloads block a common python library used to download files?

We switched to simplecast.fm a few episodes back. My bet would be that that has something to do with it. I don’t listen to our own show, so I don’t know. :slight_smile:

I can understand why you wouldn’t listen to your own podcast, but I thought you might be interested in finding out why your service provider is preventing long time subscribers from downloading your podcast. Isn’t that job 1 for such a partner?

You obviously have better taste than the rest of us!

Ducks and hides

1 Like