Page To Podcast Maker - Pod Pager

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about web development and podcasting. One thing i’ve often wanted is a podcast when it doesn’t exist. An easy way to make a podcast feed out of web page. Take a page, find the mp3’s it links to, and make a podcast.

The idea came from when i wanted to listen to the Long Now Seminars before they added their own podcast feed. I could download them individually, but that was a pain. I tried using webjay, that worked, i’ve got a version of the long now podcast generated with webjay. Unfortunately i had to sign up for an account, register, setup a page on webjay. All of which is a lot of work to make what is really an alternate view on a page. Converting html in to a more limited podcast feed.

So today i bulid a new app, PodPager.com which takes a web page and converts it in to a podcast. It’s got a simple restful interface and discoverable urls, eg: podpager.com/podcast/longnow.org/projects/seminars/.

That’s it. There is no database, no registration, just some intelligent caching and an open transparent system. It totaled out at a hefty 217 of ruby on rails code. I tried to implement it in camping but discovered i really like rails better.

Until now the simplest way i’ve known to create a podcast, and the way the majority of people do it, is to have a blog, with blogger, or elsewhere. You provide a link to your mp3 of the show, and pass your rss feed in to feedburner. Feedburner takes the feed, looks for mp3’s and converts it to using enclosures. It’s not a bad setup, but you’ve got to be generating a feed already, and have it correctly link to the mp3’s without having that html stripped. WIth podpager that step is eliminated. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Oh, before you ask, this doesn’t compete with odeo, it’s a simple lightweight service. Once you create a podcast it’s better to feed it in to odeo. Perhaps i’ll build out a xslt transformation like feedburner does and include an odeo player in the web display of the podcast.