andthennothing.net: Feeding oneself“first there was a three-legged monkey...”tag:andthennothing.net,2005:TypoTypo2005-12-18T03:19:05+00:00Jonas Bengtssonjonas.b@home.seurn:uuid:7926e1bd-abe9-4447-9e6e-8d4836c1c5d22004-08-04T23:39:23+00:002005-12-18T03:19:05+00:00Feeding oneself<p>Since <a href="http://hem.passagen.se/zanoi/blog/2004/08/happy-new-year.html">I’m a big boy now</a>, I’ve been feeding myself for a couple of days now. I don’t know why I’ve not started before.<br /><br />I rent my <span class="caps">DVD</span>’s from a nice service called <a href="http://www.brafilm.se">Brafilm.se</a> (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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.python.org">Python</a> script that scrapes three of their lists (new releases, soon to come, and top 100) and creates one <span class="caps">RSS</span> feed for each list. I only generate the feeds when I log in to my computer since I don’t want to mess with <span class="caps">CGI</span>, 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!</p>