Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual

Patrick tweaked Andrew Grumet's bitTorrentIntegration Tool for Radio to download .torrent files that are linked to in the body of the post. Hopefully it'll make it to OS X-ville so I can play with it.

What I needed to happen was for Radio to detect the enclosure, then check for BitTorrent links in the post body. If found, it aborts the full mp3 download and launches the torrent. A few lines of code later, it works ;)

If you've been following along on this weblog, you know that I recently added the 'radiouserland' tagged links from del.icio.us to my home page. Every time I publish my home page, it checks in with del.icio.us for the current list of links and displays them in the sidebar.

Suppose a number of new links are added to del.icio.us but I don't update my home page for a week. Those fresh links won't appear on my site until I publish the home page. What to do?

Well, I subscribe to the del.icio.us radiouserland rss feed in "nnw". And NetNewsWire is AppleScriptable. So, I requested help and Rob Jorgensen whipped up an applescript for me. You can copy and paste the following code into your own AppleScript in Script Editor. Be sure to replace the variables in the first two lines with ones that match your setup.

 property command_ : "touch '/Users/dwatts/Radio/www/categories/radioTheMissingManual/index.txt'"
    property given_name : "del.icio.us/tag/radiouserland"
    tell application "NetNewsWire" set feed_ to first subscription whose givenName is given_name
      if unread count of feed_ is greater than 0 then my touch_()
    end tell
    to touch_()
      do shell script command_
    end touch_ 

Now, in NetNewsWire, I created a new Special Subscription of the type, 'Script'.

I gave it a name 'Touch RTMM Index' and entered the path to the AppleScript I created earlier.

That's it for the setup.

Now, when NetNewsWire refreshes all my subscriptions every hour, this new Subscription will test to see if any new entries have been added to the del.icio.us radiouserland feed. If so, it will 'touch' the "rtmm" index.txt file. When a file that lives in the Radio www folder is touched, it automatically gets upstreamed to the server. The result is a fresh home page that is automatically rendered whenever a new link is added to del.icio.us with a radiouserland tag.

Let's discuss this on the Radio UserLand Discussion Board.

Matt is working on an exciting new tool for Radio that will make your Radio blog spider friendly

"What I've done comes in 3 parts the first two of which are part of a Radio tool I will release shortly."

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The net result is that an application can now access the contents of my blog in a completely predictable way. From any page with the <link> tag (which, in theory, is every blog page) it should be able to locate the blogmap outline and from there it can find every post, or, using the permalink as a key, any individual post. Each post is encoded in it's own RSS file and can be read using any standard RSS2.0 parser.