get_enclosures

Oddly enough, people are actually using this damn thing! I’ve seen a number of people getting the audio from this weblog with a user agent of “LWP::Simple”, so I’m assuming most or all of them are users of the script. Now the bad part is that I see all these weaknesses of the script. One kind soul has already emailed it back to me with my explanatory comments from the top in perldoc format. I also realized from looking at my logs when someone had set this up to run every minute (!) on their cron job that I really need to be checking the Last-Modified when I go to get the RSS. As it is, I give people the power to hammer the living shit out of web servers by fetching that RSS over and over. I found a great example of setting up the headers using the LWP::UserAgent to not fetch it unless new. I’ll be doing that as I can. The day job is stepping up a little, so I might be doing less evening coding for the next little bit, until I get a handle on it. There should be another release of this in the next day or two, though.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.