I want to automate the news service to pull down a copy of the RSS feed, parse it and save the news items to a local file that the website can just include. That reduces complexity on the website, and it means the front page will load faster every time.
Initially, I adapted our previous PHP website code into a PHP script that I could run from the command line. That did the job, but I thought there had to be a better way. I wondered if I could parse the RSS feed from a Bash script instead—and, it turns out that you can! It’s easy!