Podcasts with Python

Back in the first days of computing, I am told, it was thought that people would write their own software to answer their specific needs. It’s easy to ridicule this optimistic notion in a world where desktop applications took zillions of developer hours. Still it turns out that sometimes what’s available off-the-shelf just don’t meet the needs, and if you are a programmer, you are tempted to attempt your own tailor-made, if quick-and-dirty, solution.

And that’s exactly how I ended up writing my own Python script for downloading podcasts.

I am not sure how other people manage their podcast subscriptions. I never owned an iPod and never used iTunes, so I can’t rule out that the bold and the brave of Cupertino came up with something smart. I did try Juice and Ziepod and Doppler and some others. None was quite right.

So I wrote my own python script for that. It’s Here. I can’t imagine it would be very useful for other people out-of-the-box, though you may try. Hopefully it’s nicely documented so you can scrap the code for other purposes. Let me know if you find it useful andor if you have comments.

The script uses two hugely useful python modules: EasyGui and Universal Feed Parser. I’ll try to put together some lines about both in the furutre.

And since we’re talking about podcasts: the Hebrew meager tech podcasts scene recently received a reinforcement with the new “Reverse im Platforma” (Reverse with a Platform?) podcast by Ran Tavori and Uri Lahav. Naturally, it would be hard for them to make all content equally interesting for the diverse software development community, but I really recommend giving it a go.