Review: Juice

If you read my blog, you know I’m a Google Reader fan. Reader is pretty good with podcast feeds, because it lets you play the podcast right there in the browser.

But that’s not how I like to get my fix of the Daily SearchCast. I like to listen to Danny Sullivan and his co-host du jour in my car during my daily commute. To make that happen, I use Juice, which is a really nice program to save podcasts on your local hard drive. I’ve only used it on Windows, but it’s open-source (and written in Python!), so there are downloads for Mac and Linux as well.

Juice’s interface is clean, if not 100% intuitive. But the program gets the job done well. I made a directory called “Podcasts,” set Juice to download into that directory, and added the feed for the SearchCast to Juice. That’s it — it’s pretty much set and forget. You can set Juice to always run in the background, so it will check for new podcasts and download them when a new file is available.

When I’m ready to fill up with podcasts again, it’s literally less than a minute to walk away chock full of good stuff to listen to. My computer has a card reader, so when I’m ready for more podcasts for my drive into work, I pop an SD card directly into the card reader, copy all the previously downloaded podcasts onto the SD card, and remove the card. If you want to save your podcasts to one computer, I definitely recommend that you give Juice a try. πŸ™‚

P.S. I got a chance to be a first-time co-host with Danny on the February 26th, 2007 SearchCast. I promise that I was much less snarky on that podcast, and even complimented Yahoo’s movie shortcuts. πŸ™‚

33 Responses to Review: Juice (Leave a comment)

  1. Hi Matt

    See you very productive on the front of “Products/services reviews”. Not bad at all πŸ™‚

    However, still awaiting some feedback on your last visit to UK and Irland. Something about Google new infrastructure, timing of Data Push, few words about the DCs etc.. you know πŸ˜‰

  2. I’ll try to get to it, Harith. πŸ™‚ You said you wanted more gadget posts. πŸ™‚

  3. You are right, Matt. Gadgets make me Google πŸ™‚

    Here is a “Gadget” which might interest you. They call it Crasy Egg, can you imagine?

    Talking about creating search engine friendly contents while keeping your users in mind πŸ™‚

  4. Yup, I’ve seen those heat maps and they’re fun to look at. I’ve wondered how the data gets stored though; there’s a trade-off of granularity of the data vs. storage space..

  5. And there are still few limitations too. If you have a site of 40.000.000 pageviews a month you are forced to track only to the limit of 1.000.000 pageviews a month. I.e you have to choose among your site pages, which ones to do the tracking on. Not an easy task if you are working on several sites of lets say 100.000+ pages each.

    However, programs like Crazy egg might help in optimizing the ROI of AdWords medium/large campaigns and monetizing on search engines organic traffic for example πŸ˜‰

  6. keniki: there’s nothing wrong with being an outsider. Outsiders can see the forest. Insiders can only see the trees. πŸ˜‰

  7. Finally a post that will coin the term Google juice as not noobish πŸ™‚

  8. Hey Matt,

    I’ve got a question for you thats not related to this topic. I’ll post it here and hope you don’t consider it to be spam.

    Why do the results of google.com differ from google.co.uk ? For example: I own a .com domain that ranks really good on a term in google.com, but it ranks really bad for the same term on google.co.uk?

    Could you provide some additional information on these differences, for example when does google consider a domain to be “from England” and thus ranking better in google.co.uk

    Andrew

  9. keniki, you have to build up trust. No commenting after pub crawls, etc. πŸ™‚

    M.W.A., I was going to use forest/trees for a different analogy in a post very soon. Weird..

  10. Andrew, do a search for [bank] on google.com vs. google.co.uk. That will show you some of the benefit. Country-centered results are very helpful instead of monolithic search results. A couple factors that we’ve mentioned are TLD (com vs. co.uk) and where the web server is located in terms of IP address.

  11. lol at circle of trust, have to agree with you there.

  12. Juice looks like a nice app, but I see no need to install an app to download podcasts:

    podcast URLs can be found in the XML of a site’s newfeed. Just copy the URL, throw it into Firefox, and download it.

  13. Ack! Don’t show us Cute Overload! Now I’ll never get any work done!

  14. oops, that’s supposed to go on the last post. Sorry Peeps. πŸ™‚

  15. That’s a Lord of the Rings quote? Weird. I’ve never even seen the movie or read any of the books before, seriously. I’m not big on that whole thing (but to each their own, and that’s cool if you are.)

    On top of that, I managed to indirectly read Matt’s mind. Of course, Matt, that means you either have to come up with a new analogy or send me royalty cheques. Either way you go with it is cool.

  16. Coming Soon: Podcast optimization… or rather podcast usability???

    Seriously, I listen to the Daily Searchcast in my car too, via a direct USB thumb drive. That’s real convenient for me except that I’ve got to listen to 2-3 minutes of intro/ads before they tell me the date of the show. If I selected the wrong file, I’ve got to repeat the same until I get the date I want… I just hope some standards are forthcoming from somewhere?

  17. I’m looking forward to trying Juice. Sounds like it’ll made loading up at the end of the day much easier.

  18. Hey Matt!

    Unrelated question (Sorry!):

    I know you have blogged in the past about the use of special characters in the Meta title and description. I have seen a few people lately use the “>” symbol in their title and was wondering what your thoughts on that are. Is that an ok character to use? Is there something that would be better? I know you have mentioned dashes and pipes in the past, but would really like to know what you think of the greater than/less than symbols. The titles I am talking about look something like this:

    “Monkey House Coats – Pajamas For Chimps >> PimpYourChimp”

    What do you think?

  19. Adam

    “I’ve never even seen the movie or read any of the books before, seriously.”

    Ok. But I assume at least you know the Danish star Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, aka Striderand. Also in Hidalgo as Frank Hopkins πŸ™‚

  20. I don’t know what Matt thinks, but the idea of pimping a chimp is kind of disturbing to me.

  21. Harith: bad assumption. πŸ˜‰

    Since the guy never appeared on RAW, Smackdown, or House, he basically escaped my TV viewing scope. And I very rarely watch movies (I just went to see 300 Saturday…first movie I went to in the theatre since September 1). Yeah, I get out a lot..

  22. Adam

    SEOs have no time to watch TV!!

    First they should learn SEO. Then GOOG came out with AdWords. Again SEOs should learn how to manage and optimize AdWords campaigns. Then the boss wants to understand the behaviour of vistors of his own 50+ sites. Again SEOs should acquire knowledge about “Online Traffic Intelligence” πŸ™

    Much easier to work instead for Google WebSpam Team πŸ™‚

  23. Hey Matt I think I found something out that could be killing other bloggers and no one has noticed it. I think my site (listed above as well as my other blog) have been getting hit with the duplicate content filter simply because I am using feedburner. I can’t find a single post here on your blog about this so I am replying here. I’m sure you’re getting tired of me posting but I think this is finally one that warrants something.

    If anyone is using feedburner to publish their feeds and they choose to publish the entire post and not just a summary, there is a good chance Google bot will find the content on feedburner first and then your site second which makes your site get the penalty. I was searching for keywords that I ranked on the 2nd page of Google for and noticed that feedburner was now coming up instead of my site. Eric Olsen from Feedburner told me over at Google Groups that I should change my settings in my feedburner account to not allow indexing of my pages as this is apparently a problem. I can’t find this anywhere on the web yet so I can only imagine how many other bloggers might be having this same issue and not even realize it. Also, is it possible that can tell the web community how long it normally takes for a penalty like this to go away or what steps to take to make it go away?

    Thanks

  24. I have been using Juice for quite a while and it is indeed very convenient. I have it set up just as you do (Matt). Since I live in a country where I barely understand the language, I survive on English language podcasts and have about ten scheduled downloads a day. Juice handles them for me in background and every evening I just copy them over to the MP3 player.

    That’s why you don’t just cut and paste the feed into FireFox. πŸ™‚

  25. Juice is great. I use it to manage all my podcast downloads as, like you, I prefer to listen to some of them in the car (including the Daily Searchcast.) I like the fact that Juice also has the flexibility to set specific rules for how many episodes of each podcast you want to keep. On Itunes it’s only a global setting that applies the same rule to ALL your podcasts. That doesn’t work well if you listen to a mix of dailies, bi-weeklies, weeklies, etc.

    Doppler’s another good option for people on Windows platforms.

    You did a good job on the Daily Searchcast. You definitely need to do it again sometime soon.

  26. I’ve been using Juice since forever (wasn’t it called ipodder once). I use it because I only listen to podcasts on my iPod (as I’m walking the dog – I got a shout out on Danny’s show because of that!) and it’s far better than anything else for downloading; even better than iTunes!

    If anyone from iTunes is reading this can I ask one question? Why do I have to download the whole program again when you have an update?

  27. Ohhh. Sorry, dude. My bad. I thought you meant that it was in the film and that I was accidentally quoting it without giving proper cred (which really would have been weird because it’s something I thought of myself and have been saying for about 5 years.)

  28. You DRIVE to work Matt? I didn’t realize there were pepole who didn’t use the Google Bus to get to work! πŸ™‚ Our six person company doesn’t have that luxury, but I see 4-6 of those busses go by each day as I’m going between 84 and 92 on 101.

  29. very nice it even work’d semlessly with itunes and didnt interupt the webcast I was watching at the time (the spacex launch)

    Of course now ime going to have to by a nano as its going to be hard to select a podcast on my shuffle πŸ™‚

  30. I listened to your podcast with Danny and really enjoyed it. Keep up the great work!

  31. Hey, juice is really a usefull program, thank you for the tip.

  32. Problem with Juice:

    I just added an OPML file to my Juice installation… it found several podcasts that I didn’t know existed so I’m looking forward to checking the out. The problem is that the software apparently downloads any and all files that are LINKED to by own. So if the Daily SearchCast, for example, was hypothetically to link to several mp3 files one day, with the RSS feed, then Juice is going to download them all !!

    There doesn’t seem to be an option to tell Juice to get encosure’d mp3s only.

  33. HI!

    Matt said it above,
    he read it in the morning at dailysearchcast.com

    Steve Ballmer named Google again a
    a one-hit wonder

    MSR must be working on a new search-strategy.
    This above sounds common to me
    but no one asked me ever about my concept.

    ?some comments
    ?from tide36.microsoft.com

    about a sudden saurian death?!

    Greetings Karl

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