Michigan Radio on LJ

[johnridley]

I notice that a few of you friended michiganradio - and you've probably noticed that after a few months of nothing, there's suddenly a huge rush of articles. An explanation is in order.

(for non-SE Michigan friends, this is the U of M NPR station (they cover the entire southern half of the lower peninsula with 3 major transmitters))

A few months back they said on the air that "we're on your favorite social networking sites!" I half-jokingly sent them an email saying "I don't see you on Livejournal." The web content guy said "OK!" and created an account, but since their web content system doesn't have a way to autopost to LJ, they just left it lie.

Yesterday I send them an email poke asking if they were ever going to do anything. The guy said he didn't have any way to post automatically. I asked "fine, do you have an RSS feed?" He pointed me to it, last night I wrote a quick PERL script to post new RSS items to the livejournal account, pointed it to a test account, and emailed him back saying "here it is."

He gave me the password to the LJ Michiganradio account, and I repointed my script to that account. It updates every 20 minutes. So I guess that I'm now the official conduit for Michigan Radio on LiveJournal.

The big chunk of updates that just came across is just what's on the RSS feed all being posted at once. You won't see gigantic wads of stuff like that often, it'll just post new articles as they appear on the feed. Probably 4 or 5 a day.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

That was good of you.

K.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

50/50 altruistic/selfish.

The selfish part is:
a) this kind of thing is pretty fun to do
b) my current career is pretty much based on doing things that I learned to do by doing things like this. So in a way, I'm getting paid for this. Or at least, I think it's likely that I'll have learned something that I'll put to use somewhere else some day. Maybe paid, maybe just playing again. Either way, I win.

There's so much fun to be had in ways that happen to help someone out, it'd be a shame not do take part in one of them once in a while.

[jim-landis.livejournal.com]

Thanks John!

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Having a little teething trouble with it. Michigan Radio's RSS feed seems to make up random crap for the posting date sometimes, and that irks LJ. I switched from the API code I wrote to a generic perl module that can handle more stuff like that. Still didn't post exactly right so I just gave up and decided "just use current time when a new item is being posted." We'll see how that works.

[isherempress.livejournal.com]

Hey, did anyone see a guy in tights with a cape and a big S fly by? I've been looking for him!!!

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

LJ's aggregator often runs in broken chunks these days - it's a known issue. Even when it is running well, the friends view didn't work out well enough for me. I eventually went to a separate rss reader.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I had wondered.

All that stuff is still magic to me, but I'm glad it's English to you, that you nudged, and that they listened. :-)