A while back, I created a few proof of concept test feeds to use the iPodder class of scripts to get complete programs from WREK's weekly MP3 archive. One of the issues here that I ran into from the script development end is that because of the way that rolling archive works, the URL that is downloaded is exactly the same every week. Each week, that file is overwritten with new stuff, but the URL is constant. In my script, I built in the capacity to have the cache based on the date, so that the same URL could come down more than once, if the date was newer. I notice that in most of the new scripts, this capacity is missing. I could lobby the developers to build that in, but as far as I know WREK is the only existing system for which this matters anyway.

I decided to skin this cat on the server side. I wrote a simple redirector script that will take in an URL with some date parameters and redirect it to the corresponding file in the WREK archives. This way, the URL will be unique every week as the data parameters change. This should trick all the scripts into getting the file anew. It's not really a trick, they are based on uniqueness of URLs and the URLs really are unique. That the underlying file will be the same every week is irrelevant. I'm hoping that this works, my first test looked promising. The trick will be if Monday morning I wake up to have new WREK programs in my iTunes.

• Feed for the Hour of Slack and Bob's Slacktime Funhouse, the two Subgenius programs
• Feed for Personality Crisis, punk and post-punk madness