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