I made a mistake today. I posted today’s episode of Downstream with the feed pointed at the previous episode of Downstream. There are various workflow reasons why this happened, but the bottom line is: I pasted last week’s download URL in and then didn’t change it, resulting in everyone getting the wrong episode. Oops.

So, in the aftermath of fixing that error, I tried to figure out a way to prevent it from ever happening again. I took inspiration from a different system I use to post a different podcast to do it. Both approaches have one utility in common: Keyboard Maestro. (You could easily use another macro utility such as TextExpander if you wanted.)

I use the original macro to post The Incomparable. In that case, I am provided a unique ID string from my host, ART19. ART19 generally prefers to host podcast RSS itself, but I didn’t want to do that, and the ART19 download URL can be derived from the unique ID that displays on the webpage used to post a new episode.

I could type that URL by hand and then paste in the unique ID, but the chances for error in doing that are extremely high.…