my-podcasts

A personal podcast feed for the Microsoft Command Line blog.

The blog embeds a "Listen to article" TTS reading in every post, but offers no podcast feed of its own. This repo builds one: a GitHub Action checks the blog daily, collects the audio for new posts, and publishes a standard RSS feed you can follow in any podcast app.

Feed URL:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaneSpiritGOD/my-podcasts/main/feed.xml

Subscribe by URL — in Apple Podcasts on iOS: Library → ⋯ → Follow a Show by URL; on macOS: File → Follow a Show by URL.

The feed is not submitted to any podcast directory, so it is only reachable by this link.

How it works

GitHub Actions (daily at 01:00 UTC)
  → read the blog's RSS feed, compare against state.json
  → for each new post, extract its audio URL, duration and size
  → append new Episodes to feed.xml, commit back to main
  → raise a GitHub issue if something needs a human

Design notes, for the curious:

• Audio is never copied. Each enclosure links directly to the audio URL the blog itself serves, so the repo holds no media and pays no bandwidth. A daily check recovers the links if the site ever rotates them (ADR-0001).
• Self-healing. A post that fails to fetch today is retried tomorrow; a transient outage delays an Episode but never loses it.
• Alarms, not silence. Broken audio links and a feed that has stopped advancing both open a GitHub issue automatically (ADR-0005).
• Kept alive. A committed stamp file ensures GitHub's 60-day inactivity rule can never silently disable the schedule (ADR-0006).

Further decisions are recorded in docs/adr/; project vocabulary in GLOSSARY.md.

Running locally

Requires Python 3.12 (pinned in .python-version); no other dependencies.

python3 src/run.py             # refresh feed.xml and state.json
python3 src/run.py --dry-run   # report what would change, write nothing
python3 src/run.py --refresh-all  # re-check every Episode's audio link

Exit codes: 0 healthy · 1 needs a human · 2 could not start.

Run the tests with:

./test

Repository layout

Path	Purpose
feed.xml	The published podcast feed
state.json	Record of every post processed, and its outcome
src/	The pipeline (extraction, feed rendering, alarms, keepalive)
tests/	Test suite — run with ./test
assets/	Cover art sources
.github/workflows/	The daily refresh workflow

License

The code is MIT. Aggregated content — titles, summaries and the TTS audio — belongs to Microsoft and remains under that site's terms; this repo links to the audio but does not host it.