201 Inspirational Videos (from TED) -- hackaddict.net

I was doing my usual thing at lunch today (watching a TED talk as I ate) and noticed the url said http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/201. I have been watching a lot of these videos lately, and I decided I might as well watch them in order. I wrote a quick ruby / Mechanize script (source below) to loop through videos 1-201 and fetch the titles for each. Some of the titles did not have the speaker/topic, but most did. Here they are:

Quick and dirty ruby code:



#!/usr/bin/env ruby



require 'rubygems'

require 'mechanize'



html = "<ol>"



agent = WWW::Mechanize.new



201.times do |i|

  url = "http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/#{i+1}"

  begin

    page = agent.get url

    line = "<li><a href='#{url}'>#{page.title}</a></li>"

  rescue Exception => e

    line = "<li>Couldn't fetch #{i+1}</li>"

  end

  html += line

  puts line # show me where you are

end



html += "</ol>"



o = File.open('ted.html', "w")

o.write(html)

o.close

( I was looking in the rdoc for a way to do a HEAD request instead of a GET to save some time, but couldn’t find out how. Didn’t feel like messing with curl, so I just stuck with the GET. )