Podcasts are all the rage right now. I listen to a fair few, and I’ve got opinions about them. Opinions that I’m happy to share with you. You can read the first post in the series, where I talk about the SF podcasts that I’ve enjoyed here, and read on for my opinions about podcasts in the hand-wavey category of culture and ideas.
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Monday, 15 February 2021
Tuesday, 28 August 2018
Homebrewed RSS feeds
Some time ago, the BBC redesigned their news site and, for some unfathomable reason, removed most of the RSS feeds for their reporters’ blogs. Being a fan of Brian Taylor, I grumbled at this for a bit and eventually wrote a little scraping script on my Raspberry Pi that polls the appropriate page and turns it into an RSS feed that I could consume in my preferred reader. Later, the (excellent) NHS Behind the Headlines news site did the same. Upon enquiry, they offered a private API that would let me recreate an RSS feed, and, again, I wrote a little script to manipulate this into the shape I required. However, until now, I’ve kept these on my private web server, but always meant to move them to somewhere more public so that others could use them if they wanted to. So without further ado:
- Brian Taylor (BBC Scotland political correspondent)
- Douglas Fraser (BBC Scotland business correspondent)
- Mark Devenport (BBC Northern Ireland political correspondent)
- Jonathan Amos (BBC science and space correspondent)
- NHS Behind the Headlines
Feel free to use any of these with your own reader.
(Usual disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with either the BBC or NHS, and these feeds could go away at any time if any corporate lawyers start getting angry). Enjoy!
(Edit 2019-03-06: added feed for NI political correspondent Mark Devenport)
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Proud of the BBC
The BBC is a brilliant, diverse, and vital organisation. I can’t imagine life in Britain without it. It isn’t just a broadcaster, it’s an institution, part of our national fabric – there’s a reason we call it Auntie Beeb. I’m not even going to attempt to list some of the amazing programmes, both on television and radio, that it’s produced over the years, we all have our favourites. What constantly amazes me is the breadth of its ambition. This is an organisation whose remit spreads from Strictly Come Dancing to the World Service, from Eastenders to Radio 4. It can encompass tastes from the opera-going Radio 3 listener to the soap and reality TV watching viewer.
It doesn’t just have a glorious history, but it’s still making innovative television and radio today, and its enthusiastic embracing of new media has led to it producing one of the best websites in the world (although I’m not exactly convinced by their enthusiasm for DAB radio). Its news gathering is the first place I turn to when I want both factual descriptions of what’s going on and decent analysis.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m proud of the BBC. And I’m not the only one. Mitch Benn is so proud of it that his next single is about shouting that very fact to the rooftops. It expresses the same sentiments I would like to, but more eloquently and with a degree more panache.
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