So I have an iPod Shuffle, and I love it dearly. Compact, easy to use, holds a quantity of music I find useful, etc. Another thing I love a lot is WFMU, makers of the finest in online ecclectic radio. And, lo and behold, they have a fine selection of their shows archived—in mp3 format, no less! Perfect for sticking on my little iShuffle.

Well, almost perfect. The shows are quite long—3 hours in many cases. Often, I want to stop listening to a WFMU show in the middle and come back to it later, at the point where I left off. Now, famously, the iPod Shuffle has no GUI, and athough I usually don't care, this is one case where that's kind of annoying—shuttling around all these big 3-hour sound files is kinda inconvenient.

Fortunately, iTunes has this neat feature where, if you can convince it that a given file is a "podcast", it (and the iPod Shuffle) will remember where you were in the file the last time you listened to it. So I've written a little webapp that takes the WFMU RSS feeds (which aren't in the particular format that iTunes wants podcasts in) and translates them into something iTunes can handle.

Here's how it works: you go and look at the WFMU playlist page, and choose the show for which you want a podcast. They all have 2-letter abbreviations; for example, "This is the Modern World" (my current favourite on any radio station anywhere, yaaay DJ Trouble, you kick ass) is "LM". Her playlists are at http://wfmu.org/playlists/LM; the RSS feed is at http://wfmu.org/playlistfeed/LM.xml. You take that magic "LM" and plug it into my script URL, which is http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast, like so:

http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast?LM

Now try "subscribe to podcast" using that last URL under the Advanced menu in iTunes—you should get a new entry in your "Podcasts" list with Trouble's latest musical delights. Download and transfer to your iPod at your convenience! And the best part is, it's totally reusable for other shows; for Diana's Kamikaze fun machine, just use http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast?DK; for Coffee Break for Heroes & Villains, use http://boywithmachine.net/wfmucast?NU, and so on.

Here's the code; it's done in Mason, and requires XML::Simple and LWP::Simple:

wfmucast-1.0.tgz

I'm always proud when I write some code that does something that's actually useful to me. I hope someone else finds this as useful as I do.

So much has happened since I last posted, aieee. I have no idea how to tell you about Florida, Ottawa, preparations beginning for my shodan test... So for now I'll stay mum on all of the above, except to say: they all went/are going fine, my family and friends are delicious and wonderful, and I love them all. Hopefully more sooner or later.

Meanwhile! The topic at hand: I saw vee a few months ago and it wasn't quite usable; now that it's looking more so, I was seriously tempted to just chuck this crazy nb/Mason/SQLite monstrosity and start again from scratch. Cooler heads prevailed, however, when I considered the unreasonably daunting task of reimplementing all the custom stuff that I actually like about this blog. Which left the important question: why was I so eager to get off this platform?

See, I think part of my blog silence over the last little while has been due to an unwillingness to sit through the full nb generation process. Yeah, that's probably silly of me, but it's at least been part of the situation (insane busy-ness, travel, sleep deprivation and friends have all played their parts, too, of course). So vee presented the possibility of something that would be dead simple to set up, and when I started playing around with it, it was so smooth and quick to render that I had to seriously consider: what, exactly, about my current process might be holding me back from writing?

Very happily, I took one last look at the nb site before bidding it adieu, and lo and behold, there were a few tips about exactly the sort of previewing I've wished I could do for a long time now. Also: enough new shininess to convince me to upgrade to the latest source. That's right folks, we're on the bleeding edge here (3.4 "rc1"—although really it's just svn head as of this morning). I'm thrilled to say that I'm satisfied with the performance improvements and improved workflow I can get out of this version. So: no big, painful migration is in store right now. Not only that, I managed to fix a long-standing deficiency in my own custom-hacked comments module: you can now actually see how many comments an entry has from the front page! Huzzah. People had complained about that one.

Other stuff coming Real Soon Now:

• the ability to see the number of comments from the archive index pages, too - done!
• the ability to supply an email address, so that you can get notified if your comments get replied to

Enjoy!