Yet again an opportunity to fix the RFU podcast feed…
This used to be a page in the site, but with the recent revamp it seemed better to have the entry as a post.
I have been waiting quite a bit for the RFU to make their podcasts available via iTunes or some other similar service. I used to listen to them but for one reason or another the feed changed to the extent that no submission was done to iTunes and the RSS of the RFU’s website is basically dead.
So, I decided to hack an RSS that can actually be used to download the RFU podcast and get some information about Rugby. So I used a combination of Feedity Feed43 which uses HTML scraping to generate an RSS of almost any page. I stopped using the other service as it started using a form of gating that did not allow for the MP3s to be playable without visiting an annoying page. With the help of Yahoo Pipes I managed to use the magic of regular expressions to add appropriate dates and enclosures to the feed. After Yahoo stopped the Pipes service I decided to go a bit native and present the MP3 items with bear information. At the end of the day, what I want is an easy way to listen to the podcast. Anyway, the result is the RFU Podcast Feed.
So, as long as the RFU does not change (again… ) the way they deal with their website and the posting of their mp3 content, then you can enjoy a bit of Rugby right in your mp3 devices.