On my first attempt, I tried to use the Replace field to transform each item immediately into an RSS entry, for use in my hand-built feed. Grep is a funny language, but basically I’m searching for the individual patterns in each paragraph and, using parentheses, grabbing the pieces I value- (.*?) is grep for “match everything until you reach the end”. I used BBEdit’s Find feature, with Grep pattern-matching turned on, to turn this into tab-delimited text: The original consisted of a couple of hundred paragraphs that looked like this:ġ: Chronicle TV critic's new podcast(, 32:43) The first step was to take that HTML fragment and turn it into something more regular. To do this, I used BBEdit a lot and Microsoft Excel a little. What I need to generate is a valid podcast RSS feed. So that’s my starting point-an HTML fragment containing the episode number, name, download URL, post date, and run time of the classic episodes of TV Talk Machine. Later, in 2014, Tim and I brought back the TV Talk Machine as a more serious podcast about television, though we kept the same cheesy Apple stock theme song, “Broadcast News Short.” We’ve done 200 episodes now.Īs a part of the 200th episode festivities, I thought I’d take all the archival episodes of the TVTM, which I downloaded from the Chronicle website years ago and posted (with links) on a page on The Incomparable, and bundle them up in an RSS feed so that any fans of the old show could take a nostalgia trip and listen to them in their podcast player of choice. I brought the guys back together for a few reunion shows recorded in the Macworld podcave, but the run was over. The original TVTM ran from 2007 through 2010, and then Tim left the Chronicle and that was the end of it. The show, co-hosted by culture writer Joe Garofoli, very rapidly became more like a comedy podcast, with endless funny voices and “characters”, wacky listener letters, and a complete lack of professionalism that brings to mind my current favorite podcast, The Flop House. And while I realize that’s not a task most people will do, perhaps this article can serve as a little bit of inspiration for some future moment when you find yourself in desperate need of a fast way out of an intractable text situation.įirst, a little bit of backstory: One of my favorite podcasts in the ’00s was TV Talk Machine, a podcast hosted by Tim Goodman, then the TV critic at my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle. Today I used it to generate a podcast feed out of a chunk of HTML. I’ve used BBEdit to transform the source pages of websites, to format a mailing list properly, and more. Text munging takes many forms, but generally it happens when you’ve got a bunch of text in one format and you need to get it into a different format. But the other thing I use BBEdit for is a bit more esoteric and hard to describe-something I call “text munging”, for lack of a better word. When people ask me what features of BBEdit I use, I can mention Markdown tools and syntax support, which I use for writing stories like this one. This podcast feed was created in BBEdit and Excel. Using BBEdit and Excel to revive a dead podcast feed
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