You are hereAdding Media Enclosures to APOD

Adding Media Enclosures to APOD


Posted on January 19, 2008 at 22:01

So, like many other folks in the twitterverse, I've recently started using Dave Winer's FlickrFan.It's a fun little program and where it's still a little rustic, it is an excellent product with a lot of potential. The concept of automagicly pulling down photos from flickr, the AP wire and other feeds for my screen saver / desktop / where ever else I want to see them has been great. Scoble wrote his opinion on it here last month.

One of my favorite sources for photos is the Astronomy Photo of the Day. Unfortunately, their RSS feed does not have media enclosures, so the photos won't show up in FlickrFan (as well as any other piece of software that uses media enclosures). So, after a little hacking today I have built script to create an rss feed using APOD's rss feed as an input. The media enclosure is the high resolution version of the picture on APOD's site (I am scraping the HTML to pull this off). In the next day or 3 I'll post the source, once I know it works, and I have a chance to document it properly.

If anyone wants it the RSS feed is available here. http://feeds.feedburner.com/seanreiser/apod

The source code is available here: http://seanreiser.com/files/apodgen.php5.txt

If there are any questions, comments, criticisms or snide remarks, fell free to leave them below.

Share and enjoy!

Upgraded the script to handle png / bmp and gif mime types. Sorry to anyone who might have had problems with today's photo.

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