I have managed to insert older tracks into an existing podcast – it works really well, but is not at all automated. I may automate it, but since it requires a restart in order to get the hostname redirect to work properly, it’s not all that user-friendly.

It’s also useful if you accidentally deleted a podcast episode, but want to reimport it.

The updatePodcast “track” trick does seem to work. I wonder if that was fixed recently or if I just overlooked it. I probably tried to use it on, you know, a podcast album or something.

So I will take another stab at updating individual podcasts as they’re published from Typecast. It would definitely be the coolest if it could revise podcasts in place.

As to your idea injecting an episode essentially into a podcast you don’t own, I think your trick might work. If only because iTunes does seem to be kind enough to keep around old junk even when the server stops including it in the feed. So yeah once you go back to the real feed I think you might be OK. I will look into this, too.

It should be easy for me to add “Date” to the list of things I allow the user to update. Right now I just use the current date or something I think.

The major rationale for my not just “updating the existing” subscription is that there’s no way for me to get iTunes to update a particular podcast “right now.” I have to ask it to update all podcasts, which can be quite a lengthy operation.

Select a podcast ‘album’, or any file from a podcast, and then use the following AppleScript to update just that Podcast:

tell application “iTunes”
repeat with trk in selection
updatePodcast trk
end repeat
end tell

My plan is to write a script that:

a) changes the URL of the selected podcast.
b) puts the currently selected Finder files into the right place
c) generates an XML file with the right info, in the right place
d) updates the selected podcast
e) puts the old URL back

Do you think this will work?

I’d also love to help in any way I can. I’ve done a fair bit of AppleScript hackery with iTunes, if that helps!

P.S. The checkbox width is also wrong in FireFox. Try using:

p #enablePreviewCheckbox
{
width:12px;
}

in your Stylesheet.

One thing I like about running my own HTTP server is that I can be extremely finicky about what gets handled. I think this decreases the security risk for users vs. enabling Personal Web Sharing – though I may be kidding myself. My HTTP server only responds to a couple GET commands. doesn’t let you POST, or relay, or anything like that. I also like the way that, by handling all the requests myself, I don’t have to ensure that the RSS files get to any particular place – in fact, they don’t even have to exist as files. Most of all I don’t want to have to tell a user “you have to turn on personal web sharing to use this.”

Thanks for the feedback about the well-functioning. I think I’m leaning towards the nuisance of the duplicate feeds being a “1.0 killer.” If I can’t fix that then it might be a beta forever :)

Daemonizing the Typecast server might help, although if it were triggered by Applescript, it could just launch, do its thing, and then quit again. For my own usage, since I’d ideally like to have the whole thing just work automatically in the background (kind how normal podcasts do), doing a complete update of all podcasts wouldn’t be a problem. I’d rather have it go update everything than end up with a new subscription each time it ran. I guess another method would be to have Typecast run in the background and watch the folder itself, so you wouldn’t have to mess with folder actions and all that.

BTW, I’ve done a couple updates on my machine with the beta and it’s worked fine so far. Ship it! :-)

(Side note: iTunes won’t even accept a file: URL for a podcast’s *content*, which means that when you drag an item from the local disk I have to “reflect” the file, providing iTunes with a bogus URL that points at Typecast instead of a local disk file: URL.)

The major rationale for my not just “updating the existing” subscription is that there’s no way for me to get iTunes to update a particular podcast “right now.” I have to ask it to update all podcasts, which can be quite a lengthy operation.

If people express interest, it might be worth “daemonizing” the Typecast server so that it can handle update requests at any time – even when Typecast is not running. This would improve the user experience a lot and allow “podcast configurations” to exist independently of the Typecast application running. If this project ends up surviving, then I will definitely make sure to allow AppleScript access to the configuration “heavy lifting” as you suggest. For the first release, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible because I’m still feeling out whether anybody else will find this app useful :) I’m glad to know that there is at least one person!