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!↩

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

See also: this previous post, again inspired by an item on You And Yours¹, on Birkenhead Park, complete with lively debate in the comments about its claim to be the first public park in the world.

1. Yeah, I listen to You And Yours quite a lot: proof, if proof be need be, that my Radio 4 addiction is completely out of hand. Just be thankful that I’m not posting excerpts from The Archers (which has been quite exciting lately, what with Owen’s rape trial).↩

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

Alien communiqué? The ghost of Delia Derbyshire? Numbers station intrusion? Cock-up at Broadcasting House?

I dunno, but it sounds good.

Update: Mike D points out in the comments that an Ask Metafilter user was wondering about the squeaks too.

(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.

Over the years, I’ve found myself listening to more and more radio content on my iPod, especially when travelling, and have built up quite a collection of In Our Time episodes (rather laboriously, using iRecordMusic) and it’s a testament to the show’s consistent high quality that almost all episodes bear up to repeated listening (my frazzled lack of short- and long-term memory probably helps, too).

So, I hope folk respond well to the download trial - all the recent hullabaloo about Podcasting and iPodder has left me cold, simply because the Podcasted material available at the moment tends to be crushingly dull, unprofessionally produced and overly geek-focussed, but if the BBC expand this new service and offer up RSS feeds with MP3 enclosures, so that listeners could wake up each morning with hours of Beeb-quality listening automatically loaded on their iPods, I’d start looking for a way to pay my license fee twice over.