Blogging in the wind

Podcast.net now with tags

Combine two current host issues in the blogosphere and, what do you get? Podcasts with tags! Miyagawa-san just send me a link to Podcast.net... now with tags.

«Each of the podcasters listed in the Podcast.net directory have the ability to provide a series of keywords that help to describe what their podcast is about. By removing all non-alpha-numeric characters and spaces, tags are formed from these keywords. The resulting tags are a more standard way to communicate these keywords to others and provide links to them».

I don't think that tagging whole feeds, instead particular podcasts, is particularly interesting or useful, but it's a step closer in that way.

Easypodcast

My friend Joaquín just launched Easypodcast, an open source wizard to easily do podcasting. It's programmed in Python and runs on Windows and Linux. The idea behind is really simple: you setup the FTP account, select all the MP3 to publish and the software creates the RSS file with proper enclosures and uploads all the files on the server.

If you want to know what's podcasting is all about, I found via Dan Gillmor  a 4 minute-video explaining it.

Planet Express 0.1

I've released the first version of Planet Express, a Python script that uses a blog as the public interface for the feed aggregator. Planets are public feed aggregators. For example, you can read Planet Movable Type or Planet Python. The mother of all planets is Planet, a Python script that read a list of feeds and uses templates to generate the front page of the planet. However, I think that using a blog for the front page is more efficient while taking advantage of a full featured CMS's like Movable Type, Blogger or TypePad. Right now, I'm testing the 0.1 release (source code available in BSD license) in Planeta Canarias.

It requires requires Python 2.1. It uses Universal Feed Parser (Mark Pilgrim) and OPML Paser (David Janes). Planet Express reads an OPML file containing a list of feeds. Then, it reads each feed and extracts the new entries. Finally, it publishes the new entries in a blog using metaWeblog API. For each entry, Planet Express saves a unique identifier in express.hsh. This file is readed when parsing new entries to avoid re-publications. Entry titles in the aggregator blog use the format

  <blog URL>blog title</blog URL>: <post URL>post Title</post URL>

Blog's URL and title are taken from OPML feed file (htmlUrl and title attributes of outline element).

The remote publishing configuration is stored in express.cfg file, which has the following format:

[Remote API]
method=metaweblog
point=http://www.typepad.com/t/api
appkey=
username=myuser
password=mypassword
blogid=771313
opml=myfeeds.opml

You will find more information in README and INSTALL files, in the released package. Suggestions welcome.

Similar software is Ben Hammersley's Crossposter for MT and Morbus' MyRSSMerger, the two of then programmed in Perl. Planet Express' initial implementation was done in Perl, but some of the CPAN modules I used had troubles dealing with feed encoding (some Spanish feeds use ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 and other ones, UTF-8). Pilgrim's Feed Parser is a kick ass library and support both RSS (and its many versions) and Atom.