Last year, I had been plowing through old episodes of a few Tech podcasts. I was able to get through all of Developing Perspective (they are short) and was working on Build and Analyze. I’m halfway-ish through B&A, but my listening has died off in leu of new episodes of other shows.
I’ve missed listening to it. The reason it dropped of is playlist related. Everything I listen to is in one playlist that I prune from time to time. I didn’t add B&A to it because I didn’t want to have to download each episode each time. I downloaded them all at once. If I added it to the playlist, all 108 episodes would have shown up. I had a separate playlist just for this show. But, I would forget about it.
I got to thinking about reruns. TV has them. YouTube has them. Why not this medium? Whether specifically for podcasts or RSS feeds in general, I thought something might exist. Something that would take a feed and give back the items at a pubDate+days interval. This way, whatever you consume the feeds with, will think it’s new. This could be done by modifying the pubDate, though some feed scrapers might not care that a pubDate might be in the future. The other method would be to restrict a feed based on a range of days (or weeks for Podcasts).
I googled around for a bit. The back of my mind thinks it remembers something from…. 5 or so years ago? No luck. Then I wanted to build a service to do it… Then I remembered time is scarce these days. Yahoo Pipes to the rescue!!
I got a pipe working that overcast would accept and process. Then tweaked it for more public consumption.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/timbroder/podcastreruns
The Pipe has 3 inputs (listed in a different order from that link for ease of explanation)
- Feed URL: Paste in the url of your podcast feed here
- How Many Weeks ago to start: This is when in the podcast to start pulling from. If want to start at the very first episode, use the number of weeks between when the episode first aired, and now. I want to start B&A at episode 49. It aired on 10/24/2011. It’s currently 7/29/2014. So, I want to start 145 weeks ago
- How many episodes do you want per week: This depends on how much you want, and how often the podcast released episodes. If it was a weekly podcast and you want to get 1 episode a week, put 1. If it was weekly and you want 4 episodes a week to catch up faster, put 4. What this is doing is loading all the feed items in between the “start week” and this number at once. Podcasts that come out more than once a week will be multiplied by this number
Configure as needed, then cick “Run Pipe” to confirm you see the appropriate episodes. Then, grab the RSS url for this configuration. Load this URL into your pod catcher.
I’ve been testing this for a few weeks now and it’s working great! Another good use would be [Overcast’s](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overcast- podcast-player/id888422857?mt=8&at=11laRZ&ct=pro) “Retired Greats” Section:
If you are interested in the inner workings of this Pipe, here is a screenshot. Though, looking at this now, getting more than 1 episode a week needs some tweaking.
