Great item on Jeffrey Veen's blog last week — a helpful tech tip for compulsively-downloading MP3 blog junkies:
[H]ow to keep up? For a while, I just visited a couple of interesting and well written mp3 blogs, but then they'd link to a couple more, and I'd start reading those. And then that happened a few dozen more times. My desire to stay in touch was in conflict with my increasingly limited free time.
Wget to the rescue. It's a utility for unix/linux/etc. that goes and gets stuff from Web and FTP servers — kind of like a browser but without actually displaying what it downloads. And since it's one of those awesomely configurable command line programs, there is very little it can't do. So I run wget, give it the URLs to those mp3 blogs, and let it scrape all the new audio files it finds. Then I have it keep doing that on a daily basis, save everything into a big directory, and have a virtual radio station of hand-filtered new music. Neat.
Link (Thanks, Skye Ashbrook)
Update: BoingBoing reader ill says, "I was sad thinking that it was a shame that it was unix/linux only when the light popped on in my head… I have a mac, therefor I have a unix box. Here is an easy to follow tutorial on how to get wget working on OS X 10.2 (also works on 10.3) as long as you have the developer tools installed (my mac came with them installed): Link. I followed these instructions to the letter, and it's working."
On the os.x 10.3 tip, reader plemeljr adds, "Here is a nifty free program named DeepVacuum. It is a gui frontend for wget for os.x. Link"
And reader W3 says, "Wget is available for all *nix platforms _as well_ as for Windows." Link
