Overcast Integration

How PodQueue’s Overcast Integration Works

PodQueue supports use with the third-party Overcast podcast player, which uses a server-side periodic podcast feed refreshing mechanism. In order to try to keep the PodQueue playlist feed you see in an Overcast client up to date, playlists for PodQueue Premium subscribers utilize the Overcast Ping API to ping Overcast’s servers when a PodQueue-hosted feed needs to be refreshed.

Overcast Ping support is a PodQueue Premium feature.

How PodQueue’s Overcast Integration Respects Your Privacy

We only send Overcast Ping requests for playlists that have had a previous crawl request recorded originating from Overcast’s servers.

PodQueue playlists are “Private” by default, with a link only accessible and knowable by the playlist’s owner, and so should only be added to Overcast in the initial case by a playlist’s owner. If you relax a playlist’s privacy settings to “Unlisted” or “Public”, if any user adds the playlist to their Overcast account, it will receive Overcast Ping requests.

Technical Details

We use the urlprefix and urlcontains Overcast Ping API parameters alongside how PodQueue feed URLs are constructed to limit ping requests and avoid disclosing any private playlist identifiers in the request.

For example, for the following private PodQueue feed URL:

https://podqueue.fm/users/example/playlists/1_QWnU1JsGS-yTOmS4T3IQ/podqueue.rss

We would construct an Overcast Ping API request with the parameters urlprefix=https://podqueue.fm/users/example/playlists/ and urlcontains=/podqueue.rss. Thus this will match the feed URL while omitting the private key, and for a public playlist will match all possible available feed URLs for the playlist.