Posts Tagged ‘backstage’

Bye-bye to ‘UK Traffic Checker’

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Until this month, I had an Android app which displayed road traffic problems on a given route.

It was a fairly simple app, but kinda useful and managed to find 33,000 or so users.

But it’s stopped working. It was using a bunch of travel news feeds from BBC Backstage.

Those feeds now all return:

BBC Travel Feeds

…we will be discontinuing access to all traffic and travel feeds released via the backstage.bbc.co.uk project, this will include both tpegML and RSS formats…

In the short-term, I can’t find a straightforward replacement (a free and open source of feeds for local traffic and travel news) and so I’ve unpublished the app from Android Market. Sorry.

(I have tinkered with writing my own feeds from NTCC data, which is something I’ve played with before. This is technically do-able – I’ve already written a basic PoC to demonstrate, but there are issues – such as I’d need to pay for the hosting of it, and the data only covers motorways and trunk routes unlike what the BBC had. So not sure whether this is a realistic option.)

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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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PlugLondon

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Yesterday was PlugLondon – a developer meetup held at Skype’s offices in London.

It was different to the geek meetings I’ve been to before… for one thing, I didn’t bring a laptop or write a line of code!

The focus was slightly different – the idea seemed to be to bring together developers with companies who produce API’s. People came from a variety of tech companies (such as PayPal, eBay, skype, BBC, Yahoo!) to give presentations on the API’s that they are responsible for, either to introduce it or explain some interesting or novel technical aspect. I’ve played with many web services and APIs, but I definitely learnt a few things.

It was a chance for them to get feedback on their API’s from the developers that they’re trying to encourage to use them. It was very interactive – they seemed keen to find out who had tried the API’s, what people thought of them, what people would like to see added or changed, and so on.

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