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• Google Tech Talks feed clone without duplicates

NOTE: 30 minute check interval just right as the script is updated every 60 minutes on my end

I've been subscribed to their feed before but canceled my subscription soon because the flood of duplicates took down the signal to noise ratio below what I was willing to accept. So I have hacked together some sort of feed proxy using Planet to solve that issue. The trick is to re-write the entry's ID to the URL of the video page so the RSS client can and actually does the duplicate detection for you. Here's an example entry after processing:

<item>
  <title>Hands-on Teaching, Designing, and Learning</title>
  <guid>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEr4fkErWQE</guid>
  <link>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEr4fkErWQE</link>
  <pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:34:42 +0000</pubDate>
</item>

As a sidenote that talk is quite fun; I like it mostly because of it's hack- everything attitude, the high energy and the remark that restrictions can boost creativity. The trick I told before can be applied to any other YouTube channel. I could release the Planet config but it's trivial and you'd tweak it anyway. So I'll leave that for on-request.