In my "Sybase ASE Tech Talk Podcast - FIXED!" blog post, I go over why the vendor's podcast feed is broken but I won't bore any one here about that as it is more political than not.

Scenerio: A vendor provides an ancient RSS 1.0 feed that they say works. Problem is that it doesn't work with any podcast aggregator that I know of (iTunes, Amarok, WM 11, etc). I know that RSS 2.0 podcasts work fine, so I download the RSS 1.0 feed, parse it, convert to a RSS 2.0 feed and upload it to my personal website.

In all truth, I gave more than adequate time for the vendor to fix their podcast feed but was rebuffed.

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use Net::FTP;
    use XML::RSS;
    use LWP::Simple;
    use CGI::Util qw(unescape escape);
    sub clean_str {

            # there is a bunch of garbage in the descriptions in the s
+ybase rss file
            my $str = shift;
            $str =~ s/\%C2\%96 //g;
            $str = unescape($str);
            return $str;
    }
    my $rss = XML::RSS->new;
    my $new_rss = XML::RSS->new (version => '2.0', encoding => 'ISO-88
+59-1');
    my $content = get( "http://www.sybase.com/detailList/rss.do?nodeId
+=113048" );
    eval { $rss->parse($content) };
    if ($@) {
            die "Bad XML document!!\n";
    } else {
            $new_rss->channel(
                    title           => unescape( $rss->channel('title'
+) ),
                    link            => $rss->channel('link'),
                    description     => unescape( $rss->channel('descri
+ption') ),
                    language        => $rss->channel('language')
            );
            foreach my $item ( @{$rss->{'items'}} ) {
                    $new_rss->add_item(
                            title           => clean_str( $item->{'tit
+le'} ),
                            enclosure       => { url => $item->{'link'
+}, type => "audio/mpeg" },
                            description     => clean_str( $item->{'des
+cription'} ),
                            pubDate         => $item->{'pubDate'}
                    );
            }
            $new_rss->save("/home/jason/ftp/sybase_ase_tech_talk.rss")
+;
            my $ftp = Net::FTP->new("ftp.somewhere.com", Debug => 0)
                    or die "Cannot connect to ftp.somewhere.com: $@";
            $ftp->login('my_login','mypassword')
                    or die "Cannot login ", $ftp->message;
            $ftp->cwd("rss")
                    or die "Unable to change directory to /rss", $ftp-
+>message;
            $ftp->put("/home/jason/ftp/sybase_ase_tech_talk.rss")
                    or die "Cannot upload ase_tech_talk.rss", $ftp->me
+ssage;
            $ftp->quit;
    }
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