Today In History Podcast

About

This podcast project spawned from the success of my other automated podcast TIL Reddic Recap. I wanted to refactor my code to extend it for easy use in new subjects. History is something I enjoy learning about, so it seemed like a great fit for my next project.

The podcast now contains a new intro song, credit goes to music by longzijun.

The Technology

The Today In History podcast is an application written using JavaScript and the NodeJS framework. The application completes the following tasks on a daily schedule to produce the automated audio podcast:

Queries the History.com RSS feed for the daily episode text
Cleans the headline text to limit potential error during TTS conversion
Creates an intro, numerated headlines, and closing scripts for the day's podcast
Creates a back up of the daily script text in json format
Creates a show note text file of links to each post on Reddit
Uses a TTS (text-to-speech) API to create the shows audio files
Uploads the final podcast MP3 file to AWS
Creates an updated, itunes' supported, XML feed
Pushes the XML feed changes to the feed file hosted on AWS
Conducts internal cleanup and logging for the days tasks

The application is scheduled to produce a new podcast every day at 7:15 AM PST and can be found on iTunes or by subscribing to the podcast feed directly at

https://pcr.apple.com/id1004270236

Support

Help keep this project alive!

Donations are needed to help cover hosting and future improvements. If you enjoy the show and feel you get some value from listening, then maybe you will be willing to help support the show. A little goes a long way, anything can help. Thanks!

Support with Patreon

Other ways to support coming soon...