What is Automated Serendipity?

ser·en·dip·i·ty

n., pl. -ties.

1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
3. An instance of making such a discovery.

Automated Seredipity is a command line "iPodder" style application written in PHP (apparently there's another one out there somewhere called "PHPodder", but I can't find it). It is so called because you can set this thing to run as a schedule, and have fresh music every day, enabling you to be constantly discovering new and exciting music.

The script works in two parts:

1. The PHP script looks at a list of pages taken from a file and collects all references to audio media files. Whilst it is doing this, it builds up a shell script (batch tested, should work in bash with a little tweaking) of calls to wget.
2. The shell script is then called and each media file encountered is downloaded to a folder relating to the site it was found on.

Your average session might look like this:

Automated Serendipity v1.0
==========================
http://www.strawp.net/serendipity

Date of today folder: 2005-05-19

Feed URL                                                              New files
========                                                              =========
http://www.freemotionhiphop.com/                                              0
http://www.fluxblog.org/                                                      1
http://www.indiepodcasting.com/urbanpodcasts.xml                              1
http://www.lugradio.org/episodes.rss                                          0
http://www.soul-sides.com/                                                    0
http://www.moistworks.com/                                                    0
http://www.earfuzz.com/                                                       0
http://brokebboys.blogspot.com/                                               0
http://lemon-red.blogspot.com/                                                0
http://www.scissorkick.com/                                                   0
http://certifiedbananas.blogspot.com/                                         0
http://houstonsoreal.blogspot.com/                                            0
http://laundromat-united.blogspot.com/                                        2
http://www.thestencil.com/                                                    0
http://www.themfinest.com/blog/                                               0
http://www.20jazzfunkgreats.blogspot.com/                                     1
http://www.cocaineblunts.com/blog/blog.html                                   0
http://www.theinternationalhouseofpussy.co.uk/mp3/                            0
http://www.beatlife.net/                                                      0
http://www.christopherporter.com/                                             0
http://boomselection.info/                                                    0
http://www.livejournal.com/users/moebius_rex/                                 1
http://katylied.blogspot.com/                                                 0
http://www.mashups.blogspot.com/                                              2
===============================================================================
Total                                                                         8

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Pre-requisits

• PHP. Built in 5.0.4, Should work in 4.x as well.
• If you're on windows, you'll need to download get a win32 build of wget. Most UNIX-based OS's have wget included.

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