andthennothing.net

Since I’m a big boy now, I’ve been feeding myself for a couple of days now. I don’t know why I’ve not started before.

I rent my DVD’s from a nice service called Brafilm.se (translates to “good movie(s)”, only available in Swedish). It works like this: you choose the movies you want to watch from their site, and prioritize them. Then they send you three movies, when you are finished with a movie you send it back. When they get a returned movie they send you another one so you (or the postal service) always have three movies. Works like a charm and is a nice service.

However, the only way to get to know which new movies they get is to go to their site once a week and check. But manual polling of sites is tiresome, error prone, and so Nineties :-). So I whipped togetgher a Python script that scrapes three of their lists (new releases, soon to come, and top 100) and creates one RSS feed for each list. I only generate the feeds when I log in to my computer since I don’t want to mess with CGI, but the lists are only changed a couple of times a week so no need for “real-time” feeds. It is just so nice to have the feeds, I can’t understand why I didn’t do this before. Note to self: scraping instead of manual polling!