From time to time I want/need to share a podcast I’m listening to in Overcast to someone that I know is not an Overcast user. Without convincing them to use the app I would like to leverage Shortcuts to create a URL to the podcaster’s site or a link that will open in Apple’s native Podcast app.
Here’s an example using the latest Automator episode:
Overcast share sheet creates this link: https://overcast.fm/+NvaKsZXMQ which directs the user to Overcast’s web interface if they don’t have the app.
There’s no guarantee the person you are sharing with is using the iOS podcasts app, so I’d be tempted just to stick with the basic URL.
You can parse the Overcast page to get the podcast name and then search for that using the “Search iTunes Store” action, but I couldn’t find any syntax that would allow me to search for a particular episode. If there is one, then the latter is certainly possible, if not quite as flexible for users of other podcast apps; I think.
Get item from list index 6 gets the 6th item from the list it is passed. When the previous action grabs all of the URLs from the Overcast web page, the 6th one is always the permalink and that’s the URL you appeared to be after.
I simply returned all of the URLs when building the shortcut, found the right one, the sixth, then tried it on a few other examples to check for consistency. It seemed pretty consistent.
If it hadn’t have been, I would have grabbed the raw HTML for the page, parsed it to find the link called “Permalink”, and returned the “href” attribute for the “<a></a>” tag for that permalink entry.
That’s exactly what I wrote about in the penultimate paragraph. The answer is yes, if there is a way to specify an episode in the Search iTunes Action. I had a few guesses at what might work, but only searching for the podcast name worked. Nothing I tried around episode names or numbers seemed to work … but it wasn’t exactly an exhaustive test.
Where can I find the Penultimate Paragraph? It seems the 5th item on the URL list shows the podcast and number. I don’t know how to make it get “Automators 8” from applewebdata://EFD680A1-779A-430F-A67C-A4B17DEC8706/itunes1406364168/automators Automators #8: File Automation - Relay FM so it can search iTunes.
In my test I extracted it from the page title. I can see that the fifth URL has the reference for the podcast, but it doesn’t have anything for the episode. On the page it is just the link for the show (not the episode). So for your example, the URL actually resolves to Overcast.
That’s not possible for the reasons given above. The information isn’t in that URL, so you can’t get it from it. Also knowing that wouldn’t help you search iTunes, but it would help build the direct access URL.
I did a quick Google and found this, which was referenced from an Apple Support forum thread. It is asking the same sort of question, but there is no answer; so unless anyone else has a clever hack, these suggest that it might not currently be possible to get down to the individual episode without actually using iTunes (or maybe the Apple Podcast app).
, It helps me a lot to send a link from a specific project called “podcast” in Todoist.