Economy Size Geek

Ok so I might as well admit that I watch a hell of a lot of television and movies. I like watching them what can I say. One ways that I end up find interesting television is by surfing horizontally in the grid with my ReplayTV looking for shows I’ve never heard of. (I’m a big fan of mid season replacements that don’t make it - Life on a stick for example)

That takes a lot of time, and if I stop then I end up with the same shows I always watch - which normally isn’t a big deal but now that summer is here and everyone is showing reruns out the ying-yang - that doesn’t work so well for me.

A long long time ago I wrote a program in Python to help me with this task. Basically it would look at the TV listings for me and keep track of show titles that appear. When a show title shows up that it had never seen before it would send out an email.

So for example when Spike started running CSI - it didn’t care because CSI is a known show (It’s been on CBS forever) but when Trio ran “The Truth About Gay Animals” it alerted me. It’s a bit of a shotgun approach - but it help filter down all the billions of repeats they like to show. (Yes I’m talking about you BBC-America)

It wasn’t great but it helped. Eventually it had some problems I didn’t feel like fixing so I just turned it off and let it gather dust.

Then about a week ago I came across this article. Basically it shows a neat little tool in Python that makes it easy for you to generate RSS feeds from the command line.

The light bulb went off - I have a program that needs to send out info - it’s already in Python - maybe I could graft this RSS stuff into the program and make it useful again.

Well folks that’s exactly what I did. I also found a major bug in the system that was preventing it from seeing shows that were on (kind of major since that is the only thing it is supposed to do).

So I setup some channels to monitor and put the feeds up for your pleasure. The system looks about 7 days ahead. It’s going to be noisy in the begining because it is building up it’s database of shows.

There are two ways you can use the feeds - you can just subscribe to the Master Feed. That is all the channels in on single feed. Or subscribe to a given channel ( I recommend this option)

Hopefully this will work and be useful - just an FYI - if it doesn’t and it isn’t I’ll be putting it back in it’s litle crate.

Oh and I almost forgot - you can go to here to see the feeds. I made the page work so that if you click on the subscribe link from bloglines you can actually select all the channels you want at one time.

Ok - so actually I wrote this a few hours ago. I had been testing my feeds in a little RSS agregator I downloaded and everything worked great. Unfortunately when I viewed it in Bloglines the HTML in the description was completely escaped meaning instead of nice HTML you got lots of greater than and less than signs.

Apparently I didn’t read the fine print in the RSS library I’m using because it does mention that it doesn’t support HTML. I didn’t realize this because the desktop ap just figures it out - but since Bloglines doesn’t I’m back to sorting this out.

One small rant

Which leads me to a small rant about Python. I really like the language. It’s very clear and flows easily. It doesn’t have a lot of bad early design decisions to overcome (Yes I do mean PHP) which makes it nice to drop in to. There’s just one problem with Python - no one uses it. Obviously I don’t mean no one - because people do use it. But every time I try to do something in Python and I need a library my choices are always incredibly limited. In this case there appears to be one and only on RSS generator for 1.0. Fortunatly someone else made a RSS 2.0 generator (it’s on version 0.1.1) which doesn’t do exactly what I want but I can fix that.