Sometimes my mouth makes promises that my brain hasn’t thought through fully. That’s the nature of overcommitting, right. Well when I said on Twitter that I planned to watch the session videos from Drupalcon Chicago 2011 as a podcast I figured there would be some Huffduffer-like app or service that would do all the heavy lifting. Nope. Oh well, but now I was bound by the encouragement of some friends and my own desire to watch these things on my iPad on the train.
Before I go any further, here’s the permalink to the page and the feed.
In the absence of a dedicated tool, I turned to the one I know best: Drupal. This site already makes heavy use of the feeds, emfield, and views modules to bring in content from other sites I use and I was able to pull an RSS feed from Archive.org using their advanced search. Unfortunately, while that recipe will bring in all the stuff I need to show the videos in a Flash player on my site, it doesn’t go so far as to collect the actual link to the file and place it in an <enclosure> tag in the views RSS feed. For that I needed to do two more things:
- RSS Remote Enclosure, to allow me to link to files outside my site in the RSS feed
- To manually copy the link to the video file from each page on archive.org and paste that into the Remote Enclosure field.
That last step was a little tedious, but the payoff was learning some good front-end performance tips on the train this morning. I’m looking forward to catching up with the rest of them.
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