Overcast Podcast Activity Feed
You can create a podcast activity feed with this script. Activity feeds are records of the things you've done. In this case, it's a list of podcast episodes you've listened to. It is similar to a last.fm Scrobble feed.
Activity feeds can be used to collect data for lifestreaming and for the Quantified Self projects.
Many thanks to Overcast.fm for granting its users access to their data.
Getting Started
- Rename overcast.cfg.sample to overcast.cfg.
- Customize the variables in overcast.cfg. (More on this below.)
- Set up a cronjob that runs overcast.py once every day.
You can specify an output file for logs with the -o flag, like so:
./overcast.py -o overcast.log
The feed will be written to the filename specified in overcast.cfg, in this example, it'd be an RSS feed named "podcast-activity.xml"
How it works
It downloads your entire user activity history from Overcast, and then makes an activity feed of the last few podcasts you listened to.
Overcast doesn't have a web API yet, so the script rate-limits itself to about once or twice a day.
When Overcast provides the API, we'll deprecate this script.
Customizing overcast.cfg
The configuration file looks like this:
[main]
username = user@example.org
password = correcthorsebatterystaple
[feed]
filename = podcast-activity.xml
href = http://domain.org/%(filename)s
title = My Overcast Podcast Activity Feed
Replace username and password with your Overcast username and password. Set the feed filename, location, and title as you like.
Protect your password
If overcast.cfg is present on your server that's serving the RSS feed, be sure to deny access to it. If you have a .htaccess file, you can do so with
<Files ~ "\.cfg$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>
An example feed
Here's an example feed. It meets RSS validation requirements. ✓
Is it any good?
Yes.
Licence
This software uses the MIT license