Radio Pop Action Streams Profile [36KB .zip archive]

As you’d expect, it’s a profile for Action Streams that will add the radio programmes you ‘pop’ to your ‘lifestream’.

To install the profile, download and unzip the archive, edit the file ‘config.yaml’, replacing the word ‘Username’ with your own Radio Pop username, and upload config.yaml and radiopop.png to the right places on your server, eg.:

/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/radiopop/config.yaml

/web/public/mt-static/plugins/radiopop/radiopop.png

Then you’ll need to activate the profile in the usual way, by logging into Movable Type, navigating to the Other Profiles section, clicking ‘Add Profile’ and choosing ‘Radio Pop’ from the drop-down menu.

To get the little Radio Pop logo to show up in your lifestream, you’ll need to edit your Action Streams CSS file. Assuming you’re using the default templates that ship with the plugin, adding a declaration like this should do it:

    .service-radiopop {
        background-image: url(http://yourwebsite.com/mt-static/plugins/radiopop/images/radiopop.png);
        }
    

If you’d like the profile to track everything you listen to via Radio Pop, rather than just the programmes you pop, change line 25 of config.yaml from

url: 'http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/Username/pops.rss'

to

url: 'http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/Username/listens.rss'

All this messy editing business isn’t ideal, but I couldn’t work out how to get the profile to ask for your Radio Pop username when you activate it, then configure itself accordingly. If I do get around to making a cleverer version, I’ll update this page straight away.

And, just in case anyone is wondering what on earth I’ve been wittering about, here’s what happens on my homepage when I pop a programme:

1. To be honest, it’s pretty likely that I’m the only person in the whole wide world who uses both Radio Pop and Action Streams, but I thought I’d make the files available on the offchance I’m not alone!↩

It’s very funny, and very, very silly. Fake news—a report on the underground sport of Church Fighting—is leavened with a healthy dollop of puerile filth, like the trailer for blockbuster musical Dr. Screwlittle & His Suck-Me-Suck-You (from the makers of Kiddie Fiddler on the Roof!), or the scene in which an unfortunate serf is made to fellate a dragon. Go and have a listen.

Glaswegian readers may remember Innes as ‘that Angry Germans man’, famed for his S&M-riddled performances in Nazi uniform at top nitespot Optimo, singing that rousing child abuse/WWII anthem, Mount Florida’s Yo La Kinski:

[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

And now for our first hymn, written by Pasta Theologian…

‘Good grief!’, I thought, ‘they’ve finally opened up the God slot to non-Christian religions! How odd that they’d choose a broadcast of a Pastafarian service to usher in this new policy!’

After the hymn was over, the minister began his sermon, and I realised that he was Welsh, and therefore must’ve said:

And now for our first hymn, written by pastor-theologian…

I am not at my best in the morning.

Rather than read out an URL at the close of a discussion about the American Society of Magazine Editors recent list of the top forty magazine covers of the past forty years, he said, “…and there’s a link to the American Editors Association on our website. If you Google ‘BBC Saturday Review’, you’ll get there.”

Not ideal perhaps - future listeners may be puzzled if Google ceases to exist, and present listeners new to the web might have trouble - but it beats the John Humphrys method (reading an URL three or four times, always incorrectly, before giving up).

Stanford on iTunes provides university-related audio content via the iTunes Music Store, Apple’s popular music jukebox and online music store. Stanford on iTunes gives alumni and the general public free access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content

It’s not a match for MIT’s Open Courseware, which provides ‘the materials from virtually all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate courses’, but there are a fair few lectures, speeches and discussions in amongst the gubbins aimed at alumni. It’ll be interesting to see how Stanford develops the service, and to see if other Universities follow suit. (It’s also, um, interesting that I’ve probably heard more lectures on my iPod than I did when I was at University.)

And in just a moment we have the first in a series of monologues by Lynne Truss on the subject of forty-something men

Fuck off.

If you’re listening on or near a computer, go to bbc.co.uk and navigate to the Front Row page to view the paintings as we discuss them.

Wonderfully clunky.

Now that podcasting is all the rage, I thought I’d crank up the virtual transmitter and start infringing the copyright of the recording artistes I admire again.

The Submit Response Radio podcast won’t follow the prevailing trend of pretending to be a real radio programme. Instead I’ll be offering an MP3 or two each week, with a brief comment on each song, with those songs being an utterly predictable exciting mish-mash of Wire-reader wankmusik, grime, blues, obscure Prince b-sides and so on. Also, to save me a few seconds, there won’t be an SRR website, though the feed is styled for viewing in a web browser as well as the various aggreagators and podcasting applications (see below).

So, here it is: the Submit Response Radio feed.

If you’d like to listen in, you’ll need one of the free podcasting receiver applications: pick from the cross-platform iPodder, or the rather more shiny-looking, and OS X-specific, iPodderX Lite. Update (23/11/04): I just found another great application for receiving podcasts, Jäger, it’s cross-platform, open source, and a fully-fledged RSS reader to boot. (The SRR feed has been tested with all three applications)

Once you’ve downloaded the application of your choice, adding a feed is very, very simple:

• iPodderX:
• Launch the application.
• Click the ‘Add’ button on the right.
• Enter the SRR feed URL into the first text field.
• Click the ‘Add Feed’ button at the bottom.
• iPodder:
• Launch the application.
• Enter the SRR feed URL into the ‘Add feed manually’ text field.
• Click the ‘Add’ button.
• Jäger:
• Launch the application.
• Drag the SRR feed URL onto the application.

Told you it was simple. Now that you’ve added the feed, click the button to check feeds, and the inaugural SRR podcast will begin downloading; then, depending on how you choose to set up your Podcasting application’s preferences, all subsequent SRR podcasts will automatically find their way onto your hard drive. (Of course, if you can’t be bothered with the above malarkey, you can subscribe to the feed in a headline reader and download the songs you like the sound of, or just check the feed in your browser from time to time.)

The first two podcasts - God I hate that term, let’s say broadcasts from now on, eh? - contain a song from Jandek’s recent live debut at the Instal festival, and the Vaselines classic Son Of A Gun, on the grounds that both are not only wonderful songs, but were also already online after recent mentions on the weblog. I’ll put a bit more effort into future broadcasts, promise.

Happy listening!

London-born MC, aka ‘ragga midget’ Lady Sovereign, leaves the bright lights and big city behind to see whether Garage music can thrive in the countryside. From the highlands of Scotland to the valleys of Wales, the flats of East Anglia to the South West wash of Cornwall, Lady Sovereign goes off the underground map and deep into the countryside to meet the village-dwelling MCs hoping to make it in the garage scene.

(I haven’t streamed it yet, but there’s a fair-to-middling chance it contains the sound of me ineptly cutting between songs from Matmos’ Civil War LP while Sov pisses herself laughing at the fife ‘n’ drums action. Woo.)

(Before spotting Matt’s efforts, I was using a rather more lo-tech solution: using wget to grab the MP3, set to run every Thursday afternoon with cron - I know, I know, l33t h4x0r stuff! - which is probably a better bet for folk not really digging the whole Podcast ‘revolution’ enough to download one of the Podcasting applications, or ‘receivers,’ to borrow a bit of last-century hi-fi talk.)

Update: All my dreams are coming true. The ones about alternative distribution methods for Radio 4 programmes, anyway. Ben Hammersly has the beginnings of an application that will record streaming radio, convert to MP3, then wrap that up as an enclosure in an RSS 2.0 feed, primed and ready for Podcasting applications to download and dump onto your iPod. Nice.