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Alex Morton
Alex Morton

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When That Inevitable Refactor Calls Your Name

This post was originally published on August 27, 2020 on my blog.

Hey all. It's me, Alex. Here on a sunny late-August Thursday morning.

I've been putting something off for a while now, and it's finally catching up to me. Although, I feel like it never really left my mind, you know that feeling? When something's just kind of always there in the background?

It's the Podcast page of my Ladies Code Collective website, and it's officially reaching that moment in the growing-up stages of a sprouting website where it just doesn't make sense anymore to continue hard-coding items to a list that only continues to grow.

Currently with each podcast episode, I'm adding a new episode section to the HTML, and while it's not out-of-hand yet, it's definitely at a point where I can imagine the sheer unruliness of it in the future.

I'm going to draft out a plan for moving it all to be rendered dynamically in my JS file. Also going to explore developer options in my podcast host website, which may be better than simply moving the hard-coding from HTML over to an ever-growing array of podcast elements in JS.

Here's the hard-coded code now - you'll see each episode's being added individually:

Hard-coded code

And here's how that looks on the UI:

Ladies Code Collective UI

Nothing's going to change on the UI, but today I'm going to explore and draft out how I'm going to make the migration to fewer lines of HTML and more dynamic code over in JS.

Eventually, I'm going to add pagination as well to only display 10 episodes at a time, but eyes on the prize for now!

EDIT AFTER PUBLISH: I JUST FOUND AN API WITH MY PODCAST HOSTING SERVICE. GAME-CHANGER!!!

Will report back tomorrow.


P.S. Did you know I have a podcast with new episodes each Wednesday? Go listen right over here >>

The Ladies Code Collective Podcast cover art

Top comments (1)

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Wayne Smallman

Hi Alex, it could be worth reaching out to podcasting experts Mark and Kieran at Captivate.

A biased recommendation (both Mark and Kieran are good friends, and I help build their analytics engine), but Captivate is designed to help podcasters build and grow their audience.