My simple bombcast navigator

19 08 12 update: I've made some changes (mostly to the javascript and json). You can find the new page here. I'll leave the old page up for now, but this new one is where I will maintain updates on the podcast information. The functionality is basically the same except that there are not (yet) any keyboard shortcuts in the new page.

Press alt + r or the "focus random" button to focus on a random visible bombcast:

After focusing on a bombcast, you can either press alt + o or click on its title to open its Giant Bomb podcast page.

You can do a simple phrase search by typing in the filter input: (the search is very inefficient)

I only intended to support Chrome, but it seems to work in most browsers. Right now the data used is generated by an offline script. It will become out-of-date when I forget to update it. Don't look at the code; it's garbage. And this might stop working when the Giant Bomb site changes.

But since it has already been useful to me, I hope someone else also finds it useful.

Old page.

@madreisz: Neat. Are you using any of the API stuff?

This is cool stuff; I like it.

Nice work duder!

@Demoskinos: I do have an API key, but haven't done anything with it. If the Bombcasts became exposed via the API that would be pretty useful. Right now the ids for the podcasts are obtained from a slow PhantomJS scrape of the archive page, which is pretty silly.

@madreisz said:

@Demoskinos: I do have an API key, but haven't done anything with it. If the Bombcasts became exposed via the API that would be pretty useful. Right now the ids for the podcasts are obtained from a slow PhantomJS scrape of the archive page, which is pretty silly.

Oh nice. Oh, and welcome to the forums! Good set of first posts.

You sir are one of several gods among men, nice work!

Awesome! Found the Swedish candy one!

That's pretty amazing, man! Nice work!

Neat! I can dig some random Bombcasts. Thanks!

This is great.

Here's hoping the new site has this kind of functionality.

This is the one thing that I was always hoping the site would add one day. Thank you so much for doing this. It makes me happy.

Awesome work duder.

Way cool.

Thanks man this will help with guild wars 2 grinding.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice work duder!

Oh, I came into this thread thinking Brad, or Jeff was going to narrate my browsing of Giantbomb.

As you already guessed, I am greatly disappointed.

EDIT: Having played with it for a few minuets, its pretty cool.

Nice, cool idea.

Gah! You beat me to the punch. Nice work dude, I've been working on something similar using the XML data from the bombcast's RSS feed.

@madreisz said:

@Demoskinos: I do have an API key, but haven't done anything with it. If the Bombcasts became exposed via the API that would be pretty useful. Right now the ids for the podcasts are obtained from a slow PhantomJS scrape of the archive page, which is pretty silly.

I agree that we should have access to the bombcast archive through the API. From a presentation standpoint, I'd love to be able to include the "preview" images that they have on the proper bombcast page, but I have no idea where they store those things.

@Fascismo said:

Gah! You beat me to the punch. Nice work dude, I've been working on something similar using the XML data from the bombcast's RSS feed.

@madreisz said:

@Demoskinos: I do have an API key, but haven't done anything with it. If the Bombcasts became exposed via the API that would be pretty useful. Right now the ids for the podcasts are obtained from a slow PhantomJS scrape of the archive page, which is pretty silly.

I agree that we should have access to the bombcast archive through the API. From a presentation standpoint, I'd love to be able to include the "preview" images that they have on the proper bombcast page, but I have no idea where they store those things.

Well, if you look at ryan's pictures on the site I know he uploads them to his account. What happens after that I don't know.

I am glad many like the page I created. I might work on it more over the weekend; if I do, I'll add the changes to the first post.

@Fascismo: I looked at your post in the API forum. I generated this simple XML file that you can try to use as a starting point. There are some 8-4 podcast images in there as well that you'll have to avoid. The latest Bombcast feed found here does contain the images you are looking for if you want to use that instead.

@madreisz: Oh wow. Weird that the bombcast page on the site links to a different RSS feed. I didn't know that more recent one existed, thanks for the heads up!

Thanks for this, I'm new to the site and I've been trying to go back through bombcasts.

@madreisz: This has been very useful to me on a few different occasions now. It makes finding game-specific discussion so much easier than it was before, so just wanted to say thanks!

This is cool. Nice work.

@ThePickle said:

@madreisz: Looks like it stopped working after the 10-23-2012 podcast?

@fluxbit: I've updated the page to include all podcasts up to now, and I (hopefully) have set it up so it should automatically update its list every day. Hurray

The new rss feed doesn't have the correct keywords for each podcast though and some descriptions are cut off, so the page is less useful. Boo

Thanks for updating the page! It's always a pain to try and get specific older episodes on the Podcast pages here.

Thread necromancy, but this is throwing a 404 now. Looks like the server hosting the domain got reset?

Oh noooooes it's doooowwwnn

ARISE THREAD!

This just went down again :(

bump