Software As She’s Developed

As I’ve been doing some travelling, I’ve had to set up podcast clients on my laptop. Two issues: * It’s a hassle to copy podcast client settings from one PC to another. What I like about a service like bloglines is that you’re free to move between PCs. That’s not so easy with Podcast clients which sit on your PC rather than a web server. * It’s a hassle to install a new podcast client and add all the feeds. I’d like to just have a list of feeds, and tick those I’m interested in. Instead, there’s a whole lot of mousing involved for every single feed. That’s using ipodder and BlogMatrix sparks, haven’t set up .net framework to test the others.

So I decided instead to boot into linux and “set up” bashpodder. Bashpodder config is so simple: just edit a single text file with all the feeds and run it. Bashpodder is a tiny podcast client written by linc, 44 lines of bash elegance. There’s still some issues with certain feeds and torrents, though the contributions on the bashpodder site apparently fix a lot of that.

Also, I wanted a way to permanently track my podcast feeds, so I can have something like the roaming profile that I have on bloglines. So the result was a little mod that wgets the config file from a webserver, and only looks at lines beginning with “http”. I’ll send it to Linc (Mr. BashPodder), but here are the main change if you want it.

The main changes were:

• Download the config file if a URL argument is specified
• Read only lines beginning with “#”
• Also “touch” podcast.log as I encountered an error running it first time (unmodified), if the log doesn’t work.

Here’s the full script after those few changes.

#!/bin/bash
# By Linc 10/1/2004
# Find the latest script at http://linc.homeunix.org:8080/scripts/bashpodder
# Last revision 12/14/2004 - Many Contributers!
# If you use this and have made improvements or have comments
# drop me an email at linc dot fessenden at gmail dot com
# I'd appreciate it!

# Ensure podcast.log exists touch podcast.log

# Grab fresh bp.conf from a URL if specified if [ ! -z $1 ] ; then if [ -e bp.conf ] ; then mv bp.conf bp.conf.old fi wget -O bp.conf $1 fi

# Make script crontab friendly: cd $(dirname $0)

# datadir is the directory you want podcasts saved to: datadir=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

# Check for and create datadir if necessary: if test ! -d $datadir ; then mkdir $datadir fi

# Delete any temp file: rm -f temp.log

# Read the bp.conf file and wget any url not already in the podcast.log file: while read feed ; do if [ ${feed:0:4} == ‘http’ ] ; then file=$(wget -q $feed -O - | tr ‘r’ ‘n’ | tr ‘ ” | sed -n ’s/.url=”([^”])”.*/1/p’) echo -e “—nFrom $feed, downloading:n$file” for url in $file ; do echo “Downloading $url” echo $url >> temp.log if ! grep “$url” podcast.log > /dev/null ; then wget –progress=dot -q -P $datadir “$url” fi done fi done < bp.conf # Move dynamically created log file to permanent log file: cat podcast.log >> temp.log sort temp.log | uniq > podcast.log rm temp.log # Create an m3u playlist: ls $datadir | grep -v m3u > $datadir/podcast.m3u