Month: April 2017

Spider / Download Website with Wget on Windows

chrisbittingLeave a comment

Wget has been around forever it seems, but is still get great tool for spidering or downloading content (all content) from a website to your local machine. Below are some simple steps to install Wget and to run it.

To install Wget:

  1. Visit http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm and download the setup file, labeled “Complete package, except sources”.
  2. Run the setup .exe and leave everything as defaults.
  3. In a command prompt (cmd.exe) change to the C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin> directory (or C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin if your on a 32 bit OS)
  4. To test, if you just run wget.exe it should return wget: missing URL

 

To download a website:

  1. In a command prompt (cmd.exe) change to the C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin> directory (or C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin if your on a 32 bit OS)
  2. Now run: 
    wget -e robots=off --no-check-certificate --recursive --level=0 -P "c:\\somefolder" http://chrisbitting.com

    (obviously replace my website with your own)

In that folder, you should soon files from the site Wget copied.

I’ve only had issues with a site that I had forced to use SSL. Wget didn’t like that.

Spider / Download Website with Wget on Windows

Using Amazon Polly from .net / c#, Get MP3 File

chrisbitting, , , 5 Comments

knight-rider-car-kittIf you haven’t checked out Amazon’s new Polly (Text-to-Speech (TTS) cloud service) it does produce some pretty great, life-like audio. Below is a quick sample on how you can feed some text to Polly, and get an MP3 file with it. I don’t cover all of the install options of the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio / .Net, but it’s pretty simple. (listen to this text here)

Below is some code:

AmazonPollyClient pc = new AmazonPollyClient();

SynthesizeSpeechRequest sreq = new SynthesizeSpeechRequest();
sreq.Text = "Your Sample Text Here";
sreq.OutputFormat = OutputFormat.Mp3;
sreq.VoiceId = VoiceId.Amy;
SynthesizeSpeechResponse sres = pc.SynthesizeSpeech(sreq);

using (var fileStream = File.Create(@"c:\yourfile.mp3"))
{
sres.AudioStream.CopyTo(fileStream);
fileStream.Flush();
fileStream.Close();
}

 

Also make sure you have the below included:

using Amazon.Polly;
using Amazon.Polly.Model;

And these 2 NuGet packages added to your project:

aws-polly

This only scratches the surface of what Polly can do. Between streaming, SSML, Lexicons and more at a great price, I think we’ll be seeing more applications use this.

Using Amazon Polly from .net / c#, Get MP3 File