RobbieTheGeek.Com

Ok so I promised I would return to this subject with my Ubuntu install, and see how I could get podcasts automagically downloaded and ready for my listening pleasure. Ok so after doing a little research, and banging my head against the wall for a few hours, I came across a great way to handle this. A little shell script called BashPodder, a tiny little bash shell that is configured via a flat text file (bp.conf). Ok so I have an account at Odeo, and my queue there can be reached through and RSS feed. So I copied the RSS feed into the config file and ran the shell script and poof! A folder is created with today's date and all new files I have added to my queue are downloaded. On top of that it creates a single playlist in m3u format. Now I am sooooo stoked I have even less reason to go back to my Windows install. Alright that is all fantastic, but how do I use all of this to grab podcasts as they are released. For all of those folks that are familiar with Unix or any flavor of Linux should be a little familiar with cron (the scheduler that is on all those OSes). Crontab file tells the backround daemon crond what to do, and with just a few keystrokes I had scheduled BashPodder to run every hour on the hour every day of every month. Here is what that looks like:

0 * * * * bash ~/Desktop/BashPodder/bashpodder.shell

So to explain this I am lift a little text diagram from See diagram:

Simple, elegant, & efficient; I hope that this provides some motivation for folks to try a linux distro of your choice. Geek out...talk to you soon...