In the IT profession learning new skills is paramount if you want your career to continue to grow along with the technology. Throughout the years I have continued my education through professional services with certifications, training sessions, and classes as well as personal growth.
I have finally begun improving my developer skills, I used to develop many moons ago, and through all the technologies and cloud services I work in I decided that Python is the skill to grow. Being the kind of guy I am I always try to make stuff that I will actually use.
I choose books that have projects that I can turn into something useful rather than throw away after the fact. This little app I built started from a small exercise to learn how to use wget to download a file from a website. Basic stuff but I decided to turn into something I could use and will use.
So I made an app to take an RSS feed for my podcast and download all the episodes locally. I then expanded it to take any RSS feed and download the files. I then put a few bells and whistles on it and decided to share it. Why not?
Security In Five – RSS Downloader on GitHub.
Written in Python 3.6 I commented the heck out of it to help anyone else learning Python to follow how it works.
You edit the code to put in the URL to the RSS feed and target directory for the downloaded files.
When you run it the app will load the RSS feed and see how many episodes are available. It will ask you how many episodes you want to download, 0 for everything, and away it goes. If the episode already exists it will skip it.
That’s it.
I plan to alter it and run it as a scheduled task daily to download the latest episode of my podcast into a separate backup folder for backup purposes on a different machine. So many things you can do and what I am finding that with Python it’s very easy to do, especially if you have programming background.
Be aware, be safe.
