But while browsing the show Facebook page, I saw this:

Good to know the end of the show is not yet within reach.

I am a large fan of the radio program “The ITD Morning After” on 1380 AM in St. Louis. 1380 AM has a terribly weak frequency. To compensate, the audio content from each show is put up daily on www.insidestl.com. (Sidenote, I’m a believer that every radio program ought to be available online. This would be great for archival purposes, higher audience loyalty and to allow their audience to listen at their convenience, but I digress.)

When I first started listening, insidestl.com was running on WordPress and it had a podcast and I gave little thought to the daily task of downloading the audio files to get them on my Zune (yes, I’m one of the 5 people that has a Zune). I used an app called FeedReader was able to download all the audio files from the site’s main RSS feed. Then the site transitioned to a DotNetNuke (DNN) platform that will referred to as the ITX debacle.

The ITX debacle removed functionality and ultimately left a lot of folks (message boarders namely) wishing they could go back to the old system. I preferred the old system, but only because the new version of the site has not provided a podcast. The audio files are still uploaded each day, but it has required me to download them manually.

Post ITX Debacle, I’ve gotten around having to download the audio files individually using the  DownloadThemAll (DTA) FireFox add-on. That has worked okay; it provides a single button click to download all files and I didn’t have to put too much thought into it. But I still had to think about it and remember each day to use DTA to get the files, which was just too much.

Now short of continuing to wish that www.insidestl.com would provide a podcast, I started looking for an automatic method to download the content. A short search led me here, which subsequently led me here.

The end result? I have a fully automatic method for downloading audio from insidstl.com

Here’s how to do it:

1. Download WGET from here.
2. Extract the file you downloaded in step 1 to c:\wget on your hard drive.
3. Create a file called sites.txt file in c:\wget. Edit it to contain: http://www.insidestl.com/ITDMorningAfter/tabid/88/Default.aspx
   Or download sites.txt from here.
4. Create a file called insidestl.cmd file in c:\wget
   Edit it to contain:
   
c:
cd \wget
wget -r -l2 -H -t1 -nd -A.mp3 -erobots=off -i c:\wget\sites.txt

   Or download insidestl.txt here. (Rename it to insidestl.cmd after downloading.)
5. Create a new scheduled task that executes insidestl.cmd at the time of your liking. Audio files are usually uploaded by 11:00 am in my experience, but I scheduled mine for 3pm.

You now have a fully automatic method to download that day’s audio with no thought or action required. This will download the files to c:\wget directory. If you’d prefer the files to end up in a different directory, modify step 5 above to include a move command to your preferred directory.

For more help with WGET, click here

For those of you looking for quality sports talk in the morning, look elsewhere. If you are, however, looking for 3 hours of daily grabass, “The Morning After” might be for you.

It seems as if the period of try outs for Karen’s spot is over and that Tina Dalpiaz won the job. Though she seems to still have a probationary period to serve out, I think she’s here to stay.

Congrats Tina.

I commend him for many reasons. Right now, I commend him most for the fact that he acknowledges when an on-air personality leaves/is fired/quits/etc. Usually, silence is the only thing that follows such an event.

Hear Frank’s explanation here

Best wishes to Karen Vail.

Memo to the rest of the radio industry: We listeners notice when someone goes missing from your airwaves, don’t pretend they never existed.