As I've been working a lot with Java over the past few semesters and will most likely end up developing Java apps once I've got my MSc I've started looking at other, more dynamic languages available for the JVM. To make a long story short: I picked groovy and to learn groovy I need to write code in it. This led me to write deRSS over the last couple of days which scratches an itch of mine just right and therefore might be useful to others as well.
So, what is deRSS?
deRSS parses RSS 2.0 feeds and downloads files referenced in <enclosure url=””/> or (if not present) <link> elements. To avoid downloading files twice deRSS stores the publication date of the newest downloaded file.
It's simple, fits nicely into my crontab and so far works pretty well. Click here to learn more.