Having been full-time at Blubrry Podcasting for three months now and overall for two years has been a real joy. Part of that job is chatting with customers, new and old, which can be a great experience. It can also be a challenging experience when they’re running into problems you haven’t run into before.

That’s where research comes into play. This episode is part of that for me. It’s a look at how show notes appear in different podcast apps. Considering there are quite a few of them out there, it’s hard to help some customers, depending on the app they’re using and on what device.

In addition to the apps out there, those who use the PowerPress plugin for WordPress (60,000+ installs as of this post) may have a little rougher of an experience because WordPress themes also control some of the formatting of posts in the end.

This is an experiment we’ve been needing to do from the support side of things for a while, but I haven’t given it time within my day-to-day. I guess I’m doing that now, right?

Let’s dig into what my current settings are with this post, shall we?

The Theme I’m Using

My theme is Twenty-Sixteen. It’s one of the default, vanilla themes that comes with any new WordPress installation. You can find it in their repository at https://wordpress.org/themes/twentysixteen/ if you like what you’re seeing on my site, which is located at https://mrdaveclements.com.

The reason I use a vanilla theme is because I will spend way too much damn time playing with the look and feel of the site instead of writing or creating new podcast episodes. Maybe it’s a little bit of obsessive-compulsive disorder?

The Editor I’m Using

When I began using WordPress years ago, there was only the Classic Editor. Sure, there are other editors – most of which are included in a page-builder plugin like Divi – but I generally would use the Classic Editor due to its simplicity. Right now, however, I’m using their Gutenberg Editor.

If I’m honest, this isn’t my favorite editor, but I do like how it breaks things into their own easy-to-edit chunks. I can change something into a header or a quote or a paragraph by hovering over an icon. This gives me some options on what I could change the formatting to. Not a bad deal, so I’ll stick with it.

Why I Like A Slimmed-Down Interface

Here are some reasons why my site is changing to a more vanilla-esque experience

• I get distracted so, so easily while writing
• I want to lean into a more simple aesthetic
• I don’t want others getting distracted by everything else I would normally add to a site.
  • I want them to focus on my words

1. I get distracted so, so easily while writing
2. I want to lean into a more simple aesthetic
3. I don’t want others getting distracted by everything else I would normally add to a site.
   1. I want them to focus on my words

It’s pretty… um… simple, really.

What Else Should I Test?

As I’ve written this post, I’ve tried to implement as many formatting features as I could think of. If you’re a podcaster using the Blubrry PowerPress plugin and you’ve had some other issues with formatting I missed, please let me know. You can send an email to me directly at [email protected] so I can add to this post and run more tests. This will help the team at Blubrry create a better product and give better responses to support tickets about this problem.