Just around the same time I was working at a place that used Oracle's web app extension, with CGI endpoints written completely in PL/SQL. I did end up writing an XML parser/serializer for it.
You should also check if the web page actually exposes this information in a <link rel="alternate"> tag. If you're running Chrome, the "RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)" extension [1] will do this for you automatically and light up an orange icon in the extensions bar. It also integrates with popular RSS aggregators so you can subscribe directly from the extension.
I enjoyed this talk at the DAFx17 conference by Avery Wang, co-founder of Shazam. It goes a little into the theory behind the algorithm, and looks at some of the more practical issues (background noise, etc.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVTnj3OIhwI
Have you been to Queens a lot? There are essentially only two subway trunks for what is the largest NYC borough by area. Plenty of neighborhoods in Brooklyn are supplied only with bus service that gets incredibly sparse at night and on the weekends. For Staten Island residents, driving a car is as much of a daily event as in the rest of Anytown USA, plus they get to pay tolls every time they venture outside their borough. Manhattan is just the smaller part of NYC (that contains most of the money.)
In fact, you don't. Your WSGI app is not a web server. It does not run or network by itself and doesn't speak HTTP. You need a compatible web server (e.g. Gunicorn) to do that for you. It's really not that much different from good old CGI. It's simple and flexible enough for a large number of use cases. Of course, that's not the only way to write web apps in Python. Using a library like Pyramid et al, you launch the HTTP endpoint manually from the main program, and attach various handlers/whatnot to it. All "self-contained".
In college, we had a two-week stretch at the beginning of a new semester when you could audition classes and add/drop them at will. This was called the "shopping period", so in my view, the shopping cart analogy on the registrar's web site doesn't sound too out of place here. Of course, the logic behind it would need to be different from an off-the-shelf e-commerce cart.
The neat thing about Rails is that going from zero to a running database-backed app is done in a ridiculously few number of keystrokes that invoke quite a bit of under-the-hood magic in terms of routing, form and view scaffolding, etc. Django is kind of similar, in that you don't need to write a ton of code to get a basic app in the browser, but it exposes a bit more of itself as you get going right away, and you need to work a bit connecting things together. As far as mature, large Django and Rails apps – the similarities outweigh the differences, in my opinion. I would recommend doing the basic Rails tutorial, it really doesn't take that much time.
The implication is that having commit rights on a highly visible and popular open-source project somehow absolves the maintainer of the need for patience and civility. I would expect quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.
While it's true you cannot get away without using an external interface for recording audio, there are many other mobile "pro audio" tasks which can be done using just the headphone out - editing, sequencing, sound design, playback, etc.
Translation: was PM at Macromedia when they shipped Shockwave