Getting stuff done

Published by neil on December 28th, 2006

I can’t say I miss the freelance developer life, but I do miss a bit of coding here and there. With the whole week off and an indulgently lazy four days behind me, it was time to get my teeth stuck into some non-commercial coding which I’ve been wanting to get done for months.

Although the BritCaster.com forums have closed shop, the main BritCaster.com site is still running, still seeing steadily increasing activity, and still seeing several new podcast registrations most weeks. So it was time to get BritCaster V2.5 into a state for testing. It’s almost a complete re-write, taking a few chunks of code from my original and squeezing it into the CodeIgniter framework - an ideal excuse to catch up and learn the joys of the latest version (1.5). So what’s new?

Nothing is online yet - I still have some more testing to do - but this is what we have so far:

1. Moved the RSS parsing over to SimplePie. I’ve been switching between several parsers and have landed back with SimplePie, despite its non-handling of iTunes tags (I want to hack SimplePie a little to at least get the ‘explicit’ tag handled). RSS parsing is a black art and trying to build something from scratch which doesn’t blow a fit at the kack-handed coding of so many RSS feeds is a virtual impossibility.
2. New RSS generation code. I’ve actually dropped support for RSS1 and Atom feeds as the server stats show minimal access activity compared to RSS2. The new RSS generation code is a lot more flexible, robust, and extensible for the future - particularly with FeedMe handling (see below).
3. Ping the server when you update your feed. Rather than waiting for the server to get around to looking at your feed, there’s now a simple ping facility. Xml-rpc handling (ping with a little more sophistication and standardised protocols) will be introduced in V3.0.
4. More prominent links for link-backs. If you are good enough to link back to BritCaster.com from your podcast home page, then the new parser will see it and give you a more visible, prominent link in current and future show listings. It’s only fair to say thank you!
5. FeedMe! This is something I actually conceived way back when I first built BritCaster in April 2005. Essentially you can enter a FeedMe URL which contains a number of keyword(s) or search word(s). FeedMe will then build a unique RSS feed for you containing any podcast posts in the system which have descriptions (show notes) or titles matching your search term(s). For example if you want to monitor what UK podcasters are saying about Tony Blair, you would enter his name into the URL and up pops your tailored RSS feed. The feeds are cached and updated once per hour, so you can keep using the same URL to monitor a keyword/search over time. Search is basic at this time, and of course it does not (yet) search the audio or video files, but I think it could be an interesting addition to the usefulness of the aggregated feeds.
6. New admin. There are also some improvements (read: actually some pages now) to the administration which will save me messing around directly in the database.

Coming in BritCaster V3.0 is organisation of podcasts (using tagging), and the ability for site users to review and discuss each show, and I am also looking at more complex boolean search capability for FeedMe. The ground work is already in place for all this, but I’m not putting even a vague stick in the mud as to when it might appear - it all depends on work commitments, of course.

All the new stuff should go live later this week once I have done a bit more testing.
So, BritCaster forums are dead, but BritCaster lives on and beginning once more (finally) to grow.

[tags]BritCaster,CodeIgniter,SimplePie[/tags]

Tags: apps, Britcaster, CMS, codeigniter, PHP, ping_facility, Podcasting, SimplePie, tech-and-geek, TechGeek, xml_rpc
Posted in Podcasting, TechGeek |