{"id":1594,"date":"2010-12-31T20:53:41","date_gmt":"2010-12-31T20:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2010-12-31T22:34:16","modified_gmt":"2010-12-31T22:34:16","slug":"an-api-for-twitter-hashtags-for-tv-programmes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1594","title":{"rendered":"An API for twitter hashtags for TV programmes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overview<\/strong>
\nHacking together an API that returns commonly-used hashtags for the programme you’re watching on the TV<\/p>\n

Background<\/strong>
\n\"tweets<\/a>Last April, I wrote a quick-and-dirty Python script that displays tweets for a given hashtag on my TV screen<\/a> so that I could follow the twitter backchannel about a programme that I watched. <\/p>\n

Considering that it was a random idea that was hacked together in a few minutes, I’ve used it a lot since then: it’s made watching a bunch of programmes much more entertaining – Eurovision is probably the best example (the commentary on twitter is hysterical), but there are many others. <\/p>\n

But I never made any changes to the script since I first wrote it. If I’m watching something on TV that I know has a hashtag, I ssh to my set-top box and run my hashtags script, giving it the hashtag to filter on in the command.<\/p>\n

I was thinking – it’d be much better if it was all automatic. It’d be better if my set-top box automatically showed tweets with the hashtag for whatever programme I’m watching. <\/p>\n

To do this, I needed some way of knowing what was the right hashtag for the programme currently on a given TV channel. I could’ve hacked this into my existing script, but I thought it might be a feature that people might find other uses for, so instead I’ve made a stand-alone thing, available as a web-service. <\/p>\n

What it does<\/strong>
\nI’ve made a web feed that returns a blob of either JSON or XML. You can get either:<\/p>\n