thisamericanlife.co

About

I really enjoy This American Life (duh), and many years ago I got excited about creating my own little archive in rebellion against the iTunes podcast subscription service at the time. I was a budding web developer and hungry for personal projects that were interesting and helped me learn something new along the way. When I found out that the current This American Life episode could be downloaded from their website for free, I knew it was time to write some code and automate this shit. Ruby to the rescue!

My first attempt at all this was a simple little Ruby on Rails application, with an /import end-point that would check the .org and see if new episodes were available. If so, it would use Nokogiri to scrape out the necessary meta data (number, title, description, date, image url, mp3 url) and save it all to a database, then use the image and mp3 urls to save copies of those files in an s3 bucket. I snagged this sick domain, and I was GOOD TO GO!

The problem is, website scraping is notoriously unreliable, design elements change, paths break, and I eventually got sick of dealing with the little bugs that I couldn't figure out. The project went to the backburner and then eventually I let the domain expire. No big deal. Moving on.

But recently I have been enjoying the process of moving some of my small database-driven websites over to Jekyll and Github Pages! I've been using it for years for my band and the roller disco in town, but it's been fun translating everything over to static site generation. Like, this frickin' thing has pagination and a pretty good little search bar, and it's all achieved with some of the basic built-in functionality. Very cool. BIG FAN.

Admittedly, I do miss out on some of the dynamic and/or automated aspects of the db-driven site. But with the help of a new and improved ruby import script and the super handy GitHub Actions cron job scheduling I think it's still less work in the end.

Also, it's free. ;)

There's an API?!

I use the label "API" very loosely here. I think more accurately this section should probably be called "End-Point" because that's all you get: one dumb end-point.

[{
  "number": 0,
  "why": "so that array[1] will return episode 1, array[2] returns episode 2, etc"
},{
  "number": 1,
  "date": "1995-11-17",
  "title": "New Beginnings",
  "description": "Our program's very first broadcast.",
  "image_url": "https://assets.thisamericanlife.co/images/0001.jpg",
  "audio_url": "https://assets.thisamericanlife.co/audios/0001.mp3",
  "url": "https://thisamericanlife.co/episodes/0001"
},{
  "number": 2,
  "date": "1995-11-24",
  "title": "Small Scale Sin",
  "description": "Small-scale stories on the nature of small-scale sin.",
  "image_url": "https://assets.thisamericanlife.co/images/0002.jpg",
  "audio_url": "https://assets.thisamericanlife.co/audios/0002.mp3",
  "url": "https://thisamericanlife.co/episodes/0002"
},{
  "number": 3,
  "date": "1995-12-01",
  "title": "Poultry Slam 1995",
  "description": "Stories decrying the wonders of turkeys, chickens, and other fowl.",
  "image_url": "https://assets.thisamericanlife.co/images/0003.jpg",
  "audio_url": "https://assets.thisamericanlife.co/audios/0003.mp3",
  "url": "https://thisamericanlife.co/episodes/0003"
},...]
  

https://thisamericanlife.co/api.json

It's literally just every episode in one big dumb dump, but it is valid json and can be parsed as such. Eventually, I want to add a couple url params for search, pagination, and probably single episodes. We'll see. Turns out, I think this shit is fun. What a world!

Hope you enjoy,

Eli 🤓