2600 "Off The Hook" Podcast Proxy

An unofficial RSS proxy for 2600's Off The Hook radio show. The official feeds (oth-broadband.xml) only carry the most recent ~10 regular episodes and omit the Overtime segments. This service crawls the full archive at 2600.net and serves a single RSS 2.0 feed with every episode, regular and Overtime.

How it works

1. For each year in range it fetches the Apache directory index (/offthehook/<year>/) to find the monthly pages (MMYY.html).
2. It parses each monthly page for mp3 links. Episodes are identified straight from the filenames, e.g.
   • off_the_hook__20260603-128.mp3 — regular show, 128k
   • off_the_hook_overtime__20260610-128.mp3 — Overtime, 128k
3. It de-duplicates by (date, overtime), preferring 128k, and renders an RSS feed with an <enclosure> per episode.

Caching (lazy, per year)

The archive is crawled one year at a time, only on request:

• Past years never change, so once a year is crawled it is cached indefinitely and never re-fetched.
• The current year (OTH_CURRENT_YEAR, defaults to the real current year) is re-crawled only when its cache is older than OTH_CACHE_TTL_SECS (default 12h). Everything else is served straight from memory.
• Crawls are single-flight: a burst of requests against a stale cache still causes just one crawl.
• Each year is persisted to disk as OTH_CACHE_DIR/<year>.tsv, so a restart reuses prior crawls — only the current year is ever re-fetched, and only once it passes the TTL.
• Note: the request that triggers a crawl blocks until that year (or years, on a cold start) finishes.

Run

cargo run --release
# feed available at http://localhost:8080/feed.xml

Configuration (environment variables)

Variable	Default	Description
OTH_BIND_ADDR	0.0.0.0:8080	Address to bind the HTTP server to
OTH_START_YEAR	1999	First archive year to crawl
OTH_END_YEAR	current year	Last archive year to crawl
OTH_CACHE_TTL_SECS	43200 (12h)	Re-crawl interval for the current year only
OTH_CURRENT_YEAR	current year	Years >= this use the TTL; earlier years never expire
OTH_CONCURRENCY	8	Max monthly pages fetched in parallel
OTH_PREFER_128K	true	Prefer 128k mp3 over 16k when both exist
OTH_PUBLIC_URL	http://localhost:8080	URL advertised in the feed's <link>
OTH_CACHE_DIR	oth_cache	Directory for per-year persisted caches (<year>.tsv)

Tip: to test quickly against only recent years, set OTH_START_YEAR=2026.

Docker

A multi-stage Dockerfile builds a small debian:bookworm-slim runtime image that runs as an unprivileged user and stores its cache in /data.

docker build -t off-the-hook-rss .
docker run -p 8080:8080 -v oth-cache:/data off-the-hook-rss
# feed at http://localhost:8080/feed.xml

The -v oth-cache:/data volume persists the per-year crawl cache across restarts.

CI

.gitlab-ci.yml defines three stages:

• lint — cargo fmt --all -- --check and cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
• test — cargo test --all-features
• build-oci — builds and pushes the OCI image to the GitLab Container Registry ($CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE/off-the-hook-rss:<sha> and :latest), on the default branch only.

Endpoints

• GET /feed.xml — the podcast RSS feed
• GET / — plain-text info page
• GET /health — ok

Disclaimer

All audio is hosted by and © 2600 Enterprises. This proxy only re-indexes publicly listed files into a feed; it does not re-host any audio.