Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Online Free TV Listing Database
Alas, I can't share the code on this one, but...
If you're remotely competent with Perl it should take you an hour or three to hack HTTP::Parser and LWP::UserAgent to automatically go to http://www.gisttv.com/ and return your local listings in whatever format you want.
I haven't done it in Frontier, but if there's any HTML parsing ability at all it can't be that hard.
I don't know if the Gist folks know this or not, but they've handily provided comments in the HTML when the table with the listing starts and ends, and after that it's trivial to check to see if you're in a
(If information really wanted to be free they'd use
Use colors for classification, and just grab the anchors for more details.
For movie channels you'll have to do a little more work for shows which don't start on a half-hour boundary, but it's not that hard.
Of course the fact that you're bypassing Gist's revenue stream when you're doing this ties into all the recent discussion on web usability versus ad impressions and my recent rant on why widespread useful XML will be slow in coming.
(And the length of that link is a perfect example of how tools shape their users, before My Netscape and My Scripting News that'd have been a one or two word link.)
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