Archive for the ‘Radio’ Category

Unofficial Clark Howard Show RSS Feed

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Another of my favorite radio shows is the Clark Howard Show out of WSB in Atlanta, GA. Clark Howard provides daily consumer advice about a range of topics mostly dealing with personal finance. His motto is “To Help You Save More, Spend Less, And Avoid Getting Ripped Off”. Now that is a show I can get behind.

Clark posts a daily recap on his site with the high points of some of the topics covered and also some of the helpful websites mentioned. I love reading the recaps, but these days if it doesn’t come through an RSS feed. I do not read it. Thus I have hacked together a Ruby script to create such a feed. The feed is located here:

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

If you would like to check out the Ruby script itself, it is located here: clarkhowardfeed.rb

If anyone that works with Clark Howard is interested in hosting this feed themselves, I would be more than happy to FTP it to the official Clark Howard site nightly when it is generated. Would save me bandwidth and hopefully enlighten more people to the wonders of RSS.

Don and Mike Show RSS Feed Update: I have fixed the Don and Mike Show RSS Feed, so it should function again. The only change is that due to the new site using the Wimpy audio player to host the MP3’s of the audio recaps, the feed no longer contains these recaps. This is because the audio files no longer follow a standard naming convention based on the date. Now they include the date and arbitrary text describing the content. Unfortunately all of this information is locked up inside the Wimply Flash Player on the site, so I cannot scrape it to include it. If this changes in the future I will let you know.

Posted in Radio, Ruby, Technology | 1 Comment »

Unofficial Don and Mike Show RSS Feed

Saturday, February 18th, 2006

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).

Posted in Radio, Ruby, Technology | 2 Comments »

The Don And Mike Show

Monday, December 5th, 2005

Let me tell you a little story. All through college I enjoyed listening to an awesome afternoon radio show based out of Washington D.C.’s WJFK 106.7 called the Don and Mike Show. This show was syndicated via the Westwood One Radio Network. Here Don Geronimo (real name Mike Sorce) and Mike O’Meara would make me laugh out loud every afternoon (their show ran from 2-6pm CST). They played here in Mobile first on the sports channel WNSP 105.5 and then moved to AM 1480 WABB where they remained for many years. Unfortunately, the local radio station did not get the kind of ratings they wanted for the show, and they were banished from Mobile. Much to my and many other fans’ dismay, their timeslot was replaced with the absolute bore and cliched Sean Hannity (I like conservative talk but this guy is terrible).

Now this was quite a few years ago before radio broadcasting via the Internet was commonplace. There were various people that would set up streaming feeds occasionally that I could find and listen to, but these would disappear once Westwood One found out about them (amongst the fans, the feeds were referred to as “Fight Club”, and anytime someone outed a feed in a public forum, the response would be about the first rule of Fight Club…fun stuff).

For some reason a couple of weeks ago, I thought about this show and decided to google it and see what was up. Much to my surprise and pleasure, I found that they now have an official website – www.donandmikewebsite.com and are now streamed online during their show (2-6pm CST). On their official site they have Daily Audio Highlights and also Show Recaps.

It is like I have reconnected with some old friends. The cast of characters involved with the show hasn’t changed much since I last listened and the material is even funnier than I remember. It is great to hear you guys again, Don, Mike, Buzz, Robbay!

One unfortunate thing I discovered upon reading their site was that Mike Sorce (Don Geronimo’s real life alter ego) lost his lovely wife Freda earlier this year. Freda was a frequent participant in the show and she was a joy to listen to. Though I’ve never met these people in person, I spent quite a bit of time listening to their show and hearing details of their lives. So I guess I felt a bit like I knew them and hearing news of Freda’s death saddened me greatly. Don took some time off and upon returning to the show did a segment by himself, as himself, Mike Sorce, talking about what he had gone through and as a tribute to his dear Freda. Here are links to a 4 part mp3 of the tribute show. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Be prepared though before you listen, for me this was one of the saddest things I’ve ever listened to. I feel for Don and his family, but it seems he is continuing his life as best as one can expect after something like this, and I am very happy to be able to listen to the show again. They truly are quality entertainment at its finest.

Oh and if you are in the greater Balitmore area, be sure and eat at O’Meara’s (owned by Mike O’Meara and affectionately dubbed by Don as Hank’s Look-Around Cafe).

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