Dashing PocketCasts widget

README.md

Description

A Dashing widget for displaying the number of unplayed PocketCasts podcasts in an account.

See a live demo here.

Usage

Due to the fact that PocketCasts does not, at current time of writing, have a public API, I wrote some code to scrape the data off their webpage. Due to extensive use of JavaScript on the PocketCasts webplayer, I chose an approach using Watir that uses a browser's webdriver. This proved tricky to test on Heroku at the time so I decided to run the script on a personal machine at home and push the data to my Dashing application.

Setup the following environment variables:

• POCKET_CASTS_EMAIL
• POCKET_CASTS_PASSWORD
• AUTH_TOKEN: the auth token of your Dashing application

Dependencies

mechanize watir-webdriver

Add it to your Dashing application's Gemfile:

gem 'mechanize'
gem 'watir-webdriver'

and run bundle install.

pocket_casts_push.rb

require 'watir-webdriver'
require 'json'
require 'uri'
require 'net/http'

class PocketCastsClient

  def initialize(email_address, password)
    @email_address     = email_address
    @password          = password
    @browser           = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
    @unplayed_podcasts = {}
  end

  def podcasts
    @browser.goto "https://play.pocketcasts.com/users/sign_in"
    @browser.text_field(:name => 'user[email]').set(@email_address)
    @browser.text_field(:name => 'user[password]').set(@password)
    @browser.form(:id, 'new_user').submit
    #load home page
    sleep(10)
    podcast_elements = @browser.elements(:class => 'podcast_content').select{ |element| element.visible? }
    podcast_elements.each do |podcast_element|
      process_podcast(podcast_element)
    end
    @browser.close
    @unplayed_podcasts
  end

private

  def process_podcast(podcast_element)
    podcast_element.click
    #load podcast page
    sleep(10)
    name = @browser.elements(:id => 'podcast_header_text').first.h1.text
    show_more = get_visible_show_more_elements
    if show_more.size > 0
      #load more entries only once
      sleep(10)
      if show_more.first.visible?
        show_more.first.click
      end
    end
    unplayed = @browser.elements(:class => 'played_status_0').size + @browser.elements(:class => 'played_status_1').size
    p "#{name}: #{unplayed} unplayed"
    @unplayed_podcasts[name] = unplayed
  end

  def get_visible_show_more_elements
    @browser.elements(:class => 'show_more').select{ |element| element.visible? }
  end

end

client = PocketCastsClient.new(ENV["POCKET_CASTS_EMAIL"], ENV["POCKET_CASTS_PASSWORD"])

auth_token=ENV["AUTH_TOKEN"]

json_headers = {"Content-Type" => "application/json",
                "Accept" => "application/json"}

unplayed_podcasts = client.podcasts.values.inject(:+)

p "#{unplayed_podcasts} podcasts"
params = {'auth_token' => auth_token, 'current' => unplayed_podcasts}
uri = URI.parse('http://your-dashboard-url.com/widgets/podcasts')
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
response = http.post(uri.path, params.to_json, json_headers)