I want to be able to set up downloads of weekly TV shows so the .torrent is automatically downloaded to my computer, ie. I just tell the program that I want (for example) Adventure Time to download as soon as it is available, and it takes care of the rest.
A quick google search showed me that TED was an option for Ubuntu, but the website seems to have disappeared.
Does anybody know of a way to do this?
I am sure that flexget is the thing you are looking for. I'm using this with Ubuntu (12.04 10.04) together with transmission. And as soon the torrent is available it will add it to transmission.
They say its trivial to set up, but no it ain't. But as soon you succeed in configure it (only one file) it works like a charm for weeks and weeks (years...).
There is no demand of account anywhere , its just your PC finding torrents in rss feeds according to your specified minimum quality and size then it ads it to your preferred torrent-client.
Maybe this is what you are looking for... Its called Sick beard
"Sick Beard is a PVR for newsgroup users (with limited torrent support). It watches for new episodes of your favorite shows and when they are posted it downloads them, sorts and renames them, and optionally generates metadata for them. It currently supports NZBs.org, NZBMatrix, NZBs'R'Us, Newzbin, Womble's Index, NZB.su, TVTorrents and EZRSS and retrieves show information from theTVDB.com and TVRage.com." (http://sickbeard.com/index.html)
Information about installation can be found here
You can do this with the following script, change the URL of the torrent and the time how often you want to check if the file exists (sleep 60 means check every 60 seconds) and change the folder you want the torrent to be downloaded to:
#!/bin/sh
while !(wget -q "http://example.com/file.torrent" -O/dev/null)
do
sleep 60;
done
wget "http://example.com/file.torrent"
transmission-cli -w ~/Download file.torrent
rm file.torrent