Feed me, Seymour!
Now that I have ‘live’ internet at my fingertips, my web development hobby is slowly gaining momentum again.
Yesterday I threw together two little widgets, after reading this excellent tutorial on Screen-Scraping.
The first is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: Take the excellent TV guides from www.tvsite.co.za and put them into a mobile-friendly format, so I can get my guides on the go.
The URL for this is: http://www.hokemon.com/scripts/tv.php - The next day, or the week’s schedules are available as links at the bottom of that page.
And for my next trick: Get the upcoming movies releases right in your RSS aggregator! Nu Metro has a very extensive ‘forthcoming attractions’ page, which I took the liberty of adapting into an RSS feed.
Stick this link in your aggregator: http://www.hokemon.com/scripts/movies.php, or click the button to add it to your Google home page. If you want to limit the number of items to, say, five then append ‘?n=5‘ without the quotes.
To spare Nu Metro the hassle of being bombarded with requests, I only get the list once per day, and generate the feed locally the rest of the time. This should reduce their bandwidth (and mine!) and stop the mconsidering me a thorn in their side. Not that they should, ‘cos it’s free advertising for them, anyway.