I have simple rules for managing my list of podcasts—which, if you’re interested, you can peruse yourself in the White Noise section of the sidebar.

1. Subscribe to anything which sounds remotely interesting. In the last three days, I’ve downloaded nearly 40 hours of audio—this doesn’t include anything I’ve actually listened to in that time, so the number is probably closer to 50.

2. Ruthlessly skip any podcast which in fact is not interesting.

3. Run a series of insanely complicated AppleScripts which delete some podcasts after they’re a few days old, save other podcasts until I get to them, and subject most of them to manual review.

There is pretty much one cardinal rule: a podcast should be a single story, rather than a concatenation of a bunch of different stories which all get mucked together. So, fer’instance, the CBC science show Quirks and Quarks is available both as an hour-long show, or as each story in a separate file. I go with the latter. (Second best option: enhanced podcasts which bookmark each story in a show.)

NPR does not like breaking up its shows—if you want to subscribe to Fresh Air or Talk of the Nation, you’re going to get it in hour-long chunks. But if you sign up for the NPR programmer interface, you can use their API to get individual stories.

The sole exceptions: the single damn shows for which this would be most useful, Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

Of course, you can download individual stories—just go to the NPR website, or subscribe to these shows’ RSS feeds, and all of the stories show up one after the other. Just click on the title, and download the file. This saves as an MP3 file. Which, in iTunes, looks like this.

The thing is, waaaaaaay back in 2002, I had an AppleScript which would parse the NPR feed, let me pick the stories I wanted, and then save them to prettier filenames. So I could at least see what the hell I was deleting without actually listening to them, which is the fate of most of my podcasts. And I don’t doubt I could do it again.

The question: why the hell do I have to? The information is there, so it’s not a licensing issue. It’s just that geeks are allowed to get access to this stuff with a little elbow grease, but everyone else can’t.

NPR, get with the program. This is seriously silly.