I was planning a quiet night in last weekend after a day of digging up the garden, so I thought I’d take a look at what was on television. To my frustration, I found that the Radio Times web site was out of action.
Radio Times has been for some time my TV listings site of choice, as it allows me to select which channels I’m interested in and then view them all in one page (though only showing a window of about 2 hours, which I can tolerate). This latest downtime is just one in a sequence of recently reliability glitches: I’ll frequently get “unable to handle request” type errors, and then some time in the last week or so, they moved the URL of the listings page without any kind of redirect.
I did a search on google to see if I could find a viable alternative, and the closest was that provided by This week’s UK TV. It allows me to specify what channels I want to view, but frustratingly I can’t see everything in one go, narrowed down to within 2 hours of now. The best I can get is 8 channels at a time. Well, GRRRRR.
Turns out the data is in XML. Hmm. I wonder how long it would take to hack together an alternative in that Swiss Army Chainsaw web application framework, Apache Cocoon?
In total, it took about 4 hours. I got it working tonight after tinkering for a while – processing the XML was not tricky, but working out a sane way of getting the current date and time into the pipeline made me think a bit.
It’s rudimentary and needs quite a lot of work on presentation, but I can at least view all my channels in a decent format. When it’s a little cleaner I’ll put it on a public server …
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Do you know XMLTV (http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/) ?
Yup, I found that project when I was hunting for XML feeds. I decided it’d be more fun to go direct to the UK feed for now, and parse it myself.
I’ll make it more generic when someone pays me to do it