I'm using v3.2.1. Also, I have ngpodwallpaper setup from iCal. Every other day the wallpaper does not download such as today February 26. The wallpaper downloaded on the 25th.

Same here and as far as I can tell the browser has nothing to do with this at all.

Well, it worked two days in a row for me: the 22nd and the 23rd; alas, I didn't try it the 24th or 25th.

Today it failed to work, and watching it run from within Automator, I noticed that

curl http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day | \
grep "class=\"wallpaper" | cut -f 4 -d \"

failed to produce a result. Same in Terminal (not surprisingly). So, it appears that the page source of

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day

varies from day to day in a way which defies NGPodwallpaper's technique for extracting the picture name from the HTML.

(Interestingly, I was able to find the wallpaper-sized version of today's photo: it's at

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Photography/Images/POD/t/026-thiruvathira-dancer-xl.jpg )

Hey folks,

Thanks for all the postings. I've been using NGPodwalllpaper for a couple of years, and this problem only began a few weeks ago. It's been known that NG will change the way they process the photos, but the writers of the NGPod program have always been on top of it and made the necessary changes to the application. My concern was that my G4 sawtooth was having a senior moment and showing its age, but, from what you all have experienced, it seems to be something with the program, per se.

I also noticed that NG is now using photos from other sources rather than their own collections. It could be that some of the photos can't translate well and so the NGP program can't read it.

If you're new to the NPGwallpaper program, the photos can be really awesome. I hope you enjoy it!

H

It doesn't work on my macbook those days, is the programme down?

NGPodWallpaper quit working on my iMac altogether. Too bad, I enjoyed the changing wallpaper as long as it lasted.

Hey people,

I've been exploring the NGPod wallpaper web site (www.maxiduncan.com/blog), and found the following comment:

21/Feb/2009 - National Geographic are regularly not including the wallpaper link on the Photo of the Day page. This means that the workflow will often not be able to find a wallpaper to download and will set the background to be blank.

Now, I know the cause of the problem.

H

I've written a few AppleScript scripts which use curl and other shell commands to extract such info as current local temperature and current heating oil prices from the HTML source of web pages on which the information is displayed; it's difficult, if not impossible, to figure out techniques which are flexible enough to survive even mild rearrangement of the source code.

Here's an AppleScript script which works—today, anyhow—on my Mac to download the Photo of the Day and set my Desktop Picture to it:

set thePic to do shell script "curl http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day | grep '<td class=\"body\"><a href=\"/photography/enlarge/' | cut -f 4 -d '<' | cut -f 3 -d '=' | cut -f 1 -d '>'"
set theCut to text 2 thru -8 of thePic
set thePaper to "http://photography.nationalgeographic.com" & theCut & "xl.jpg"
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
set photoName to last text item of thePaper
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
do shell script "curl " & thePaper & " -o" & " ~/Pictures/" & photoName
set thePath to (path to pictures folder as text) & photoName
tell application "Finder" to set desktop picture to alias thePath