Building a Podcast Episode Tracker with RSS and Web Scraping

Podcasts publish new episodes through RSS feeds, but not all podcast data is easily accessible. In this tutorial, we'll build a podcast episode tracker that combines RSS parsing with web scraping to aggregate episodes, transcripts, and metadata from multiple sources. Why Build a Podcast Tracker? Never miss episodes from your favorite shows Search across podcasts — find episodes on specific topics Track publishing patterns — when do shows release new content? Build a personal archive of episode metadata and show notes Setting Up pip install feedparser requests beautifulsoup4 pandas Parsing RSS Feeds Most podcasts provide RSS feeds. The feedparser library makes parsing them trivial. import feedparser from dataclasses import dataclass , field from datetime import datetime from typing import Optional @dataclass class Episode : title : str published : str duration : Optional [ str ] description : str audio_url : Optional [ str ] show_name : str link : str def parse_podcast_feed ( feed_url ,