Update: Instant Podcast
With Snow Leopard came an updated Automator, and along with it, and updated version of my Instant Podcast workflow. I made several changes to incorporate new actions, and the results are improved. Here's a rundown:The first action grabs the URL for the page you wish to convert. The page needs to have an RSS feed, so blogs usually work best. As tribute to Andy Ihnatko, who sent me along this road, I've used his URL for my example.
The next steps grab the RSS feed and the text from the feed articles, respectively. Sites that publish only article excerpts, in lieu of full text feeds, are of less value IMHO. I want to hear the entire postings, but then again, I'm an unabridged sort of guy.
The next step is vital, but I can't find a way to make it happen using Apple-only actions. The BBEdit concatenate action takes all of the articles and combines them into one long string of text. Without this, the workflow generates a series of individual MP3s, one for each article. If you can find a method of resolving this problem using no-cost tools, please share.
The rest of the workflow is straightforward and similar to the previous incarnation. The text is converted to an audio file. (I wish I could listen to Andy's postings in Cepstral's William voice, but the current version is incompatible with Snow Leopard. Until a fix arrives, Alex will have to do.) The date and time of conversion is added to the file name for future reference, audio is encoded to MP3 to save space, the original audio file deleted, and the MP3 is imported into iTunes and added to to appropriate playlist for syncing.
The updated workflow is available here.
