Scripting News: Multiple days of NewsHour

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Multiple days of NewsHour

At dinner on Saturday with people from the NewsHour, a couple of us fans asked if it would be possible to have a feed that included more than one day's worth of shows. We were told that the limit was technical, not legal, their simple CMS didn't have a way of including more than day in the feed. I volunteered to write a script that would include the last week's worth of NewsHours, and they said go ahead, so I did.

http://pbs.newsriver.org/newshour/podcast.xml

Right now it's only got 3 days worth, since that's when my agent started running. After a week I'll add code to cut out stuff older than one week.

Caveat: That feed may not be available forever. The hope is that the NewsHour folk will take it over. But for now, I'll keep maintaining it here (it's easy, a script does all the work).

Editorial comment: This is the first time I've read or written feeds with the itunes add-ons, and I gotta say -- what an awful ugly design. I faithfully reproduced all the garbage they make podcasters include to be compatible with iTunes. I'm proud to say none of my feeds include that stuff or ever will, and I hope iTunes ends up on the scrap heap it deserves to be on for what they did to RSS. Now I know how the Third World feels about the US. ";->"

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:32 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Feb Apr