Podcasting Hacks

Rebroadcast Your Favorite Feeds

Combine a bunch of feeds to make your own broadcast network.

Podcasting is like TiVo: you set up your subscriptions and get the shows you want as they come out. But what happens when you want to take your subscriptions on the road, or share them with your friends? This script allows you to create a single feed that pulls the most recent podcast from each feed you specify.

The Code

Save the following code as network.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use LWP::Simple;
use strict;

# The list of feeds to retrieve

my @feeds = qw(
 http://www.curry.com/xml/rss.xml
 http://www.boundcast.com/index.xml
);
# The title of the network feed

my $networkName = "My Network";

# The URL of the home page

my $url = "http://www.mysite.com";

# A description of your network

my $description = "My very own network"; # Format the current date and time my @days = qw( Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat ); my @months = qw( Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec ); my @t = gmtime( time ); my $date = sprintf( "%s, %d %s %d %02d:%02d:%02d GMT", $days[ $t[6] ], $t[3], $months[ $t[4] ], $t[5] + 1900, $t[2], $t[1], $t[0] ); # Print the header portion of the RSS 2.0 print <<END; Content-type: text/xml <?xml version="1.0"?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>$networkName</title> <link>$url</link> <description>$description</description> <language>en-us</language> <pubDate>$date</pubDate> <lastBuildDate>$date</lastBuildDate> <generator>Network 1.0</generator> END # Iterate through each feed and find ...