podcast feeds for NPR shows

A simple flask app that uses the NPR API to generate rss feeds for All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition Saturady and Weekend Edition Sunday.

The podcast feeds that NPR provides for their news programs (All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition) only contain 15 results. Typically more than 15 audio segments are published per day. Additionally, the same generic podcast image is used for each of these feeds, making it hard to identify the podcast in a podcast app.

We use the public NPR API to request a "Podcast" feed for each program. The API allows us to specify how many episodes to return, currently this is set to 50 which should provide 2-3 days worth of material for All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

The following modification are made to feed returned by the API

• Podcast title: remove phrase "NPR Programs: " from title
• Podcast image: replace generic npr image with show specific image

• install python-flask and python-flask-cache $ yum install python-flask python-flask-cache
• run $ python wsgi.py
• open 'http://localhost:5000'

To get going and start the development webserver run the following commands

$ virtualenv-3 venv
$ source ./venv/bin/activate
$ python setup.py develop
$ mkdir etc
$ echo '{"api_key": "PUT_API_KEY_HERE"}' > ./etc/nrfeed.json
$ python run.py

Flask application can be deployed and number of ways. With that said, below are the steps I used.

$ useradd -r webapp
$ git clone https://github.com/pyther/nrfeed.git
$ cd nrfeed
$ mkdir /opt/nrfeed
$ virtualenv-3 /opt/nrfeed
$ source /opt/nrfeed/bin/activate
$ python setup.py install
$ cp systemd/gunicorn.service /etc/systemd/system/gunicorn.service
$ cp systemd/gunicorn.tmpfile /etc/tmpfiles.d/gunicorn.conf
$ echo '{"api_key": "PUT_API_KEY_HERE"}' > /opt/nrfeed/etc/nrfeed.json
$ systemd-tmpfiles --create /etc/tmpfiles.d/gunicorn.conf
$ systemctl enable gunicorn.service
$ systemctl start gunicorn.service
$ cp systemd/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/npr.conf