Archive for July, 2009

What programme was on Channel 4…?

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

I posted yesterday about my quick play with the BBC Web API for programme schedules. I wanted to be able to programmatically find out what programme was on a particular channel at a given time.

The problem with the quick code I came up with was that it only gets me BBC channels. What if I want to know what was on a non-BBC channel?

Andrew pointed me at the Radio Times website, which makes programme schedule data available in XMLTV format.

And Dom pointed me at a neat Python library for parsing XMLTV data.

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What programme was on BBC1 at…?

Monday, July 27th, 2009

After my absence, I thought I’d come back with something quick and fun – the result of half an hour’s playing with a new (to me) API.

The problem that I wanted to look into was: What programme was on TV on a given channel at a given time?

And how can I find this out programmatically?

The first thing that I came across was the getProgrammes service in the beta BBC Web API.

As I expect from the forward-thinking BBC, it’s pretty awesome: a simple API that gives you an XML document containing the programmes schedule for the specified time window.

The documentation on the BBC site is pretty self-explanatory. It gives all the information you need to start playing with the API – either using the form on the BBC page, or by sending it a few requests using wget.

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I’m back!

Monday, July 27th, 2009

I’ve been a little quiet on things like twitter recently, and silent on my blog here. Work has been very busy for the past month or so, and everything else kinda got put to one side while I focused on it.

It was an interesting project: an interesting mixture of IBM server products and web development, including following James into the wonderful world of iWidget development.

But – after 8000 lines of JavaScript, 500 lines of Java, 15,200 words of documentation, and 6370 miles of customer travel – it’s all done and delivered.

Woot. I’m back. Normal deranged service will be resumed shortly. 🙂