October 20, 2004

Bloglines Podcast Extractor

Over the past few hours, I hacked together a simple Python script which pulls down my Bloglines 'Podcasts' OPML folder and copies them to favorites.txt used by iPodder (the yellow lemon one, not Adam Curry's version). This script frees me from manually updating my new podcasts in two places (Bloglines and iPodder).

Centralized administration baby.

I originally thought that Bloglines didn't supply OPML for their blogroll but that's because I only looked at their BlogRoll API (which are just simple http links and javascript). Stupid me, I should have looked at their SyncApi.

I am posting this immediately after I got it working on my setup so expect it to be very buggy or at least very inflexible for your situation. I have only tested this under Windows XP.

You can download the script here. To run it, follow these steps:

  • Install Python 2.3
  • Download the file and put it in he same directory as iPodder. Please backup your favorites.txt.
  • Change to your iPodder directory (usually C:\Program Files\iPodder) and execute this command:
    • C:\Python23\python BloglinesBlogrollExtractor.py > favorites.txt

That's really it. If you want to schedule it, that's fine, but you should realize that iPodder doesn't re-read your favorites.txt until you exit and restart. I can work on a solution to that but perhaps I'll send a note to the iPodder dev team so they can listen for manual changes to the file... or perhaps they can support this natively.

One tip on scheduling. File redirection doesn't work unless you use cmd.exe /c. So, you might see this in your scheduler:

Run: C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /c "C:\Program Files\iPodder\BloglinesBlogrollExtractor.py" > favorites.txt
Start in: "C:\Program Files\iPodder"

Good luck and let me know if you find this script useful. I would be thrilled if someone actually wanted to use it and wants me to improve it somehow.

 

Posted by Nick Codignotto at October 20, 2004 01:16 AM | TrackBack
Posted to General | Podcast
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