Pete Roome

So today i had to set up some Cron jobs to download a few feeds from various websites. I built a Social networking timeline on a site we are about to deploy here at Kyan and didnt want to hit the individual websites directly every couple of minutes in order to acquire the data.

To overcome this i decided that setting up cron jobs to download the feeds would be a more reliable method. This way our own site would not be affected by any downtime experienced by any of the sites who were providing our feeds.

I used the wget tool to download the feeds but found i was unable to download the Facebook feed i wanted. An error was returned and i checked out the page which showed that my browser wasnt supported. Fortunately wget will allow you to supply a user-agent string with your command in order to force a download in this scenario:

wget --user-agent="some user agent string" "download link"

For added sugar, you can also rename the file your downloading with wget too:

wget -O some_file_name.ext "download link"

Perfect.