Archiving 15GB of Podcast History

From 2014 to 2022, Erik Isaksen, Danny Blue, Amal Hussein, Leon Revill, and myself produced 207 episodes of The Web Platform Podcast. It was a labor of love and admiration, talking to guests and discussing the standards that worked, the one’s that we being built, and what web developers were building on top of it. At some point we lost track of the number of guests we had on panels to discuss the hot topics of the—somewhere north of 325 I recall—we are forever grateful for those wonderful people who came on the show.

Like so many things in our lives, COVID changed our availability to run the podcast, though not our love for the web. The term podcast may be a running joke—everyone has one!—but to sustain a podcast is a massive amount of work. From the scheduling, to the research, to the sound engineering, to the final cut, to the distribution is more time that most people consider. We did it without sponsorship or advertisements; we covered our costs because we loved it.

Since I think there is value in preserving that winding history, I have uploaded the nearly 15GB of audio for all the episodes to the Internet Archive. I’ve written previously on working with the API for the Wayback Machine to preserve pages on the internet, but in this case this was a bulk upload operation; easily completed in your browser of choice.

As of today, the old domain now points to the Internet Archive. No future episodes; the RSS feed and our Libsyn account have been closed. At closing, the show was listened to over 2 million times. That’s a lot of love for the web—I hope that love continues.