New Project: UnOfficial.fm iTunes Feed Generator

The Waiting Room Podcast at Official.fm

One of my consistently favorite podcasts of the last few years has been The Waiting Room, a new music show out of Cardiff, Wales. The show is broadcast on a number of internet radio stations, but I generally listen to it as a podcast, so that I can timeshift and listen when I have time not when it is being broadcast.

They’ve been hosted for some time now on Official.fm, a site which allows users to post tracks and playlists, make them downloadable, make them embeddable, and the like.

Official.fm

Official.fm does produce an RSS feed of a given user’s tracks (there’s a little grey RSS icon at the lower left corner of a user’s page), but the structure of that feed doesn’t work for podcast clients, including itunes.

A while back I made a Yahoo! Pipe that would translate the appropriate official.fm feed into something that Downcast (my podcatcher of choice) would be able to handle, but it annoyed me that this still wasn’t usable in iTunes. (iTunes requires that the enclosure file end in an appropriate extension like .mp3, which means the /download style links Official.fm produces cannot be used in an iTunes feed).

So this weekend I hacked up the UnOfficial.fm iTunes Feed Generator (github page). It takes an official.fm username (and some other metadata used by iTunes) and creates an iTunes appropriate RSS feed.

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It has come to our attention . . .

I download lots of whitepapers, ebooks, and webinars, habitually – just part of trying to keep up to speed with what’s going on in eCommerce, social computing, content management, and open source software in general.

Often downloading these things requires registration, and some level of profile information: an email address, a phone number, a corporate address, etc. (Optaros often does this as well, and I can’t tell you how many times luke_skywalker@rebel_alliance.org or similar has registered to download whitepapers – but I generally use my real email address. I like to follow rules.)

Recently I got this email, presumably in reference or followup from one of those downloads:

From: Sales Person
Subject: BigCo

It has come to my attention that you requested some information from BigCo. Please let me know if I can be of assistance.

Take care
Firstname Lastname
sales@BigCo.com

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