WFMU, my favourite radio station, has a fantastic rolling archive (http://www.wfmu.org/table).
I wanted to be able to use iTunes to automatically download recent archives of my favourite shows for offline listening (this will also work with other podcatchers). I realized that they publish RSS feeds for the archives; and thus, the XML from their RSS feeds could be transformed into the XML for a podcast using a simple web app.
I wrote this ten years ago (2008) and it still works just fine.
Here's how it works:
- Run this code somewhere; e.g. http://example.com/wfmucast
- Choose a show to receive regularly as a podcast from http://www.wfmu.org/table; for example, This Is The Modern World.
- Note the two-letter code used for the show--you can see it by clicking through to the playlist archive for the show; in our example, for This Is The Modern World, the code is LM (http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/LM).
- In your podcatcher, enter the podcast URL with the two-letter code as a query string, eg. http://example.com/wfmucast?LM
- Behind the scenes, wfmucast will go and fetch the latest RSS for the show you've chosen and translate it into XML for an iTunes podcast.
- You should now be subscribed to This Is The Modern World, receiving new episodes when they are archived.
Notes
This all assumes you know how to set up HTML::Mason ("an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age"). If you don't, Google, CPAN, or https://masonbook.houseabsolute.com/book/ will get you started.
Next Steps
Redo the whole thing in something more respectably modern (Node.js?), with proper tests, so that when WFMU does eventually break it, I notice and/or can figure out how to fix it.