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New twist, FreshAir podcast
By Dave Winer on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 11:03 AM.
A few weeks ago I noticed that my river was filled with FreshAir podcasts. Hundreds of them, dating back to 2007. One for every weekday for five years.  permalink
I figured something glitchy happened, and shrugged it off. Sometimes people adjust their content management system, and the feed guids all change, so the aggregator thinks they're all new. It's a bit more expensive in the case of podcasts because it downloads them all, and it wipes out all the other MP3s in my Podcatcher folder, because it's managed by the software to only use a fixed amount of storage. So every time a new podcast is downloaded, the oldest one is removed. permalink
But then it happened again. And again. So I had to do something about it. permalink
I was busy with another project so I did the simplest quickest thing, I unsubbed. But this meant I had to go to the FreshAir site to manually see what's new, because I like to listen to FreshAir on my daily walk. Not always, but often. permalink
This morning I didn't feel like tackling my next big project, so I did something "lite" -- I made a change to the way River2 works to allow for this quirk in the FreshAir podcast. permalink
1. Every feed has a new stat, mostRecentPubDate, initialized to 1/1/2011. permalink
2. When a new item appears in the feed, and it has a pubDate, if it's less than one day before mostRecentPubDate, I call it new, and it appears in the river, and if it has an enclosure it's added to the download queue. Otherwise it's treated as if it's already been seen.  permalink
This keeps the flow marching forward in time, not backward -- but allows items to appear out of order in the feed, and for items to be published a bit after the feed's pubDate for that item. permalink
1. My river is broken. (Appears not, so far so good.) permalink
2. I get new FreshAir podcasts, without having them repeat. permalink
Here's the worknote for this item. permalink
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