Its nice to have a project that you dabble with as a hobby. A project that even if it fails, you won’t lose cash, job, respect or pets over and can only really gain through lessons learned. Currently, my hobby project is iPlayerlist.
I started to build iPlayerlist as I wasn’t a fan of the original bbc.co.uk/iplayer site. It didn’t group episodes by series, rather graphics heavy and required too much clicking about for my liking. So over a Christmas, I began writing some code that would give me something I would use, but also as a vehicle to play around with some APIs that are about.
I’m happy with the result in that I use it and have learned stuff through developing. If anybody else uses it, its a bonus.
Anyhow, “Whats in the pot?” I hear you ask. Well here are the services the site uses.
These services all contribute in a way. The BBC iPlayer site is screen scraped (yeah I know, I know, but there are no RSS feeds or API yet so I had to). We grab a little more information from /programmes relating to each episode such as descriptions and broadcast dates. Then for each series we search youtube via its API for related videos. We then get some related blog posts via Google Blog Search. These blog results are passed through Akismet to reduce the spam, then moderated by myself.
For all this to happen Rails 2.0.2 handles the donkey work with the following
- Hpricot, for xml and iPlayer page parsing
- Mofo, for microformat parsing on /programmes
- YUI CSS Grids
- jQuery for progressive enhancement-ness
There is loads more I could ramble on about here, but I’ll leave that for another post.
