Podcast Creators: Shortcut Is Now Even Easier to Set Up

Mar. 6, 2019

If you're like me, whenever you hear an awesome moment on a podcast—a beautifully written line, a hilarious quote—you think, I wanna share that! With video and text, it’s easy to screencap or giphify or cut and paste something to Facebook or Twitter. But it was a lot harder with audio.

Until we released Shortcut in 2016. It became easy to clip any part of This American Life's enormous archive, turn it into a fun, transcribed video, and share it online.

There was just one problem. It only worked with This American Life's archive. So a year later, we made Shortcut available as open source software that any podcast creator could use.

And now, the developers at Feel Train have made that open source software even easier to implement, providing more documentation, a video walk-through, and, most excitingly, the option to launch a server with Shortcut already installed. It doesn't require a bunch of coding experience, and it empowers your fans to easily share their favorites parts of your work on social media. Now, whether you're a big media company, a local public radio station, or an indie podcaster in your garage, you can use Shortcut for your own body of work.

You can find all the documentation you’ll need here, as well as info on how to reach out to FeelTrain for technical support. We’d love to see any Shortcut installations it in the wild! If you use it for your show, email us at [email protected] or tweet us at @ThisAmerLife so we can spread the word.

We'd like to the Knight Foundation for their generous funding of this project.