Subscribing to podcasts from a local directory

30 Jun 2006 21:59 - (1) comments

At this moment I'm subscribed to the IT Conversations, Rails and Argos podcasts. Occasionally I download a single podcast that seems interesting. But I never seem to listen to these single podcasts. Finding them in my library seems to much of a hassle.

So I created a little Ruby script that creates a podcast rss feed from a given directory.
Too bad iTunes doesn't recognize file://... as a podcast url. Specifying the server makes the script less clean.

You can call this script from your crontab rss_podcast_dirs.rb /directory/with/podcasts http://localhost/your/podcast/podcasts.rss.

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

#

# Creates a rss feed of podcasts in specified location on server

#
	
require 'find'

require 'rss/maker'

require 'uri'

require 'htmlentities'
	
fail "\nUsage: " + File.basename($0) + " feed_dir podcast_url .......\n" unless ARGV.size > 1
	
feed_dir, podcast_url = $*[0], $*[1]

feed_file = File.basename(podcast_url)

server_dir = File.dirname(podcast_url) + "/"
	
def escape_xml text

    text.gsub('&', '&amp;').gsub('<', '&lt;').gsub('>', '&gt;').gsub("'", '&apos;').gsub('"', '&quot;')

end
	
def find_files(dir)

    files = Array.new

    Find.find(dir) { |file| files << file unless (File.basename(file)[0, 1] == ".") }

    files

end
	
rss = RSS::Maker.make("2.0") do |maker|

    maker.channel.title = "Podcasts from #{feed_dir}".encode_entities

    maker.channel.link = podcast_url

    maker.channel.description = maker.channel.title

    find_files(feed_dir).sort { | y, x |

        File.mtime(x) <=> File.mtime(y)

    }.collect { |file|

        item = maker.items.new_item

        item.title = File.basename(file).encode_entities

        item.date = File.mtime(file)

        item.link =

            item.guid.content =

            item.enclosure.url =

            URI.escape((file).gsub(feed_dir, server_dir))

        item.enclosure.length = File.stat(file).size

        item.enclosure.type = "audio/mpeg"

    }

end
	
podCastFile = File.new(feed_dir + feed_file , "w")

podCastFile.puts rss

podCastFile.close