These American Lives

Tracking reruns of This American Life

What is this?

This is a web app that tracks when each episode of This American Life is re-aired. thisamericanlife.org doesn't have this information.

Why?

Basically I got fed up with an old rerun getting posted, and I start listening but then 5 minutes in I say "wait a minute, I've already heard this episode from 6 years ago, they just reran it last month!" So I spent hours building this site to save me 5 minutes every few weeks, because that's the kind of guy I am.

How does it work?

The site regularly scrapes thisamericanlife.org for updated episode information and updates its own database of episodes and airings.

Build

• install Postgres
• install Vapor

$ cd TALReruns
$ vapor build

Run

1. Add a TALReruns/Config/postgresl.json with your db information

{
    "hostname": "127.0.0.1",
    "user": "<user>",
    "password": "<password>",
    "database": "<database>",
    "port": 5432
}

2. $ vapor run serve. The app will scrape all needed episodes from thisamericanlife.org, and any re-runs shown on the homepage

What's next?

• Link together episodes with later "updated" versions e.g. 628 is an updated version of 307
  • Maybe grab the info about each segment and display each episode that those appear in?... hm...
• Statistics page
• Episode search
• User submission of past re-runs via a real form instead of some Google crap
• Better design from someone who actually know what they're doing