Notices

I posted yesterday about the way that I'm collecting individual MP3s into my own podcast feed using del.icio.us and yahoo pipes, updated today with screenshots (ooh shiny!). Maybe I should have posted it in the Canola forum instead of General, so apologies for the cross post. Feel free to delete if it's not appropriate here!

Hei earth, don't worry this can be helpful to other users

thanks for the work!

Marcelo

This is similar to something I've been doing for a while now with google reader. Mainly because I am sick of trying to sync downloaded podcasts between ipod, n800, n95, my desktop and htpc machines.

The solution I use is even simpler if you use google reader and Canola...

1) subscribe to all the podcast feeds you want in gReader (adding a podcast tag or something makes them easier to find later on)
2) on a daily basis I read all my feeds and just star any items I want to read properly later OR podcasts I want to listen to.
3) Subscribe the to the Starred Items feed in Canola and it will automagically only pick up those starred items with a media enclosure (video or audio).

You could go a step further and run this through pipes, but to be honest I normally chunk through 1,000 plus items a day and only get maybe 5 media items coming through that personal filter to Canola.

The really cool thing about this method is that i) it requires no fiddling with pipes, code or individually tagging stuff, ii) you can add or remove items from the feed just by clicking the star (and the iPhone enabled google reader site is awesome on the NiT) and iii) it just works.

Barney—funny, it was Google Reader that I first turned to. I similarly use the share feature to call out the items in my feeds that I want to look at more deeply later on my PC.

The only problem is that it doesn't work for items that haven't appeared in your feeds... Say you stumble upon a reference to a podcast on a blog post somewhere and want to listen but not subscribe.

One interesting possibility is the new feature GR announced recently that lets you add something to your GR shared items using a bookmarklet—the only downside is that the media itself may not be enclosed (b/c what GR grabs isn't necessarily syndicated), unless you marked the MP3 itself, which would have to have been opened to use the bookmarklet. (unless GR is smarter than I give them credit for and actually scans an item for an MP3 link to enclose)

Using my method, you can tag any link to an MP3 in the wild using del.icio.us and run that tag through this pipe, so you can collect stuff from outside your feeds—from anywhere on the web—and pull it into Canola.
Once you configure the pipe with your del.icio.us username and intended tag (the two form fields), it's "fire and forget"—no fiddling with the code of the pipe (unless you're into that kind of thing). And you could configure a delicious bookmarklet that would prefill your tag for you, which would make it super easy, maybe even 1 click or a FF keyword if you really wanted.

That's funny - I started out with tagging and ma.gnolia for mine.

I agree that for adhoc podcasts my method isn't bullet proof by any means. The upside is that almost all the podcasts I listen too have feeds.

Interestingly though, one feature I have yet to find in Canola 2 is the ability to get podcasts already downloaded listed under podcasts rather than straight audio. This seems to work on my N95-8Gb with the podcasting app - you just drop the file into the relevent directory and it appears.

Would be kinda cool if Canola had similar functionality as I have piles of podcasts stocked up on a media server.

I couldn't agree more! It would make sense to be able to specify a podcast directory instead of a feed in the settings. Then it could scan that directory each time for changes.

(btw, funny that you started with ma.gnolia