Unofficial Don and Mike Show RSS Feed

I have written a script to generate an RSS feed of the Daily Recaps and Audio Recaps for the Don and Mike Radio Show. The feed can be found here:

http://www.theportermethod.com/donandmike/index.rss

I have been toying with the idea of creating an unofficial feed for some time. I started out planning to create a script in PHP and did some experimenting with the libraries required to do screen scraping in PHP. That fell by the wayside and this weekend after a conversation with some friends I decided to go a different route. Enter the language Ruby. You have probably heard about Ruby these days from the excitement surrounding the web framework Ruby On Rails. My site is hosted by TextDrive which provides full support for Ruby (and Rails also) so this was a viable option. And this script provided a great opportunity for me to dive into the language.

After a little perusing of some tutorials and docs and a bit of hacking, I produced a working script that generates an RSS feed for the great Don and Mike Show. Since this could preclude you from visiting their site directly, I have added links at the bottom of each entry in the feed for their streaming Internet feed, a link to download their podcasts from iTunes, a link to shop for swag from their store, and of course a link to Hank’s Look-around Cafe (also known as O’Meara’s).

The Ruby script I wrote that generates the rss file is available here: donandmikefeed.rb

It is my first Ruby script and could no doubt be dramatically improved (and will be as a get the hang of some of the fancy dynamic features in the Ruby language) so be gentle with your evaluations. Feel free to comment here or mail me with any feedback.

Also, anyone associated with the show that would like access to this script or file, just let me know. I would be glad to have it FTP’d nightly to your server so it could be hosted as the official feed (and save me some bandwidth potentially).