If you take a peek at my LJ style, you might notice that I added a little section for the podcasts to which I am currently subscribed. It was a bit of a hack, hence the text getting truncated. LiveJournal does not let you include iframes or JavaScript in your style, so there is no real way to access offsite content except through an image. In this case, I only had a fixed width for the image there. The whole image is clickable and brings you to a page with more description and individual links. Technically, I might be able to do something with imagemaps, but that felt like too much work to figure out.
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The whole thing is a mishmash of technologies–AppleScript, XSL/T, command-line apps, etc.–but is nicely wrapped in a shell script that can be called from a cron job (assuming you have your SSH keys set up to upload the stuff to the webserver). The whole thing amounts to this:
if [ “$1” == “” ]; then # Run the Apple/OSA Script, don’t print the comment lines |
The shell script contains a little bit of AppleScript to tell my RSS/Podcast app to export its subscriptions. The subscriptions just happen to be in XML format, so they can be transformed to some nifty text and HTML. The text is then stuffed into a GIF file. Finally, the image and HTML are uploaded to my webserver. Violá!