Blame the Purple Poodle

When I was about seven years old, and quite bothersome to adults, I was given free reign of my grandmother's house and told to entertain myself.  Tucked away in my aunt's former bedroom I found a synthetic purple poodle with a radio embedded in its belly.  I turned the knob, tuned in to Radio 4, and fell in love with voice radio.

News, drama, comedy, even Woman's Hour (where incidentally I first heard of personal computers); I couldn't get enough of them. Best of all were the stories. Fifteen minute segments of pure joy that drifted through the schedules from decade to decade.

These days I'm in a different time zone and listening on a different device. The view from my window has changed from a Welsh hillside to a Canadian lake; the Purple Poodle has become a shiny iPod; but my love of well narrated stories is undiminished.  I'm hooked on Starship Sofa, the Escape Artist Podcasts, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and the deliciously weird Drabblecast among many others.

I work from home so I get a lot of time to listen when I'm writing (simple) code, tending fields or rocking our newborn gently to sleep. The stories form a comforting background, or an absorbing treat.  I have my favorites; "The Clockwork Atom Bomb", "The Island", "Teddy Bears and Tea Parties"; but as I get older I find it harder to remember which tale I heard where read by whom.  So I decided to build a custom search engine and call it Zombie Robot Unicorn to represent the three genres that I'm interested in.

You can see the search engine embedded on the left of this blog.  At the moment it's pretty bare.  I've added a few early episodes from Starship Sofa to get things going and plan to add entries for each episode of all my favorites over the winter.  Once I'm up to date I'll keep adding new episodes and expand the range of sources to include PodioBooks, Librivox and others that I've not heard of, or that may not even exist yet.

I'm going to try to keep the index clean and focused, taking you straight to the single page containing the audio we're looking for whilst ignoring lists, categories and forum posts.  The focus is on the simple task of finding a story to listen to now.

I'm going to do what I can to put some helpful meta-data into the system.  Once you've done a search you can narrow the results by genre.  I'm also going to tailor the autocompletion function to be very helpful when you can't quite remember an author's name or the spelling of an exotic title.

As I update the search engine I'll make fresh posts to this blog so you can see how well I'm keeping things up to date.

Enjoy listening.

- Phil