langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2003-01-21

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Dienstag, 21. Januar 2003

New & very much improvable: rsstv — das üblicherweise in DACH-Landen wohlfeilst erhältliche Fernsehprogramm in RSS-Form mit Filteroption.

Ernüchternde Erkenntnis: Man mag suchen wie man will, allzuviel Gutes findet man trotz allem nicht.

2003-01-21-rsstv

Stop Motion Studies — Weirdly appealing.

2003-01-21-stopMo

Telecom undone — a cautionary tale — "And what about those network-free competitors themselves? Take a company like Z-Tel, founded and run by lawyers, bankers, management consultants, and an antitrust litigator. Such companies have brought to telecom the same talents that Enron brought to electricity. They build networks out of paper, and whatever actual money they invest is poured into complex software and computer systems developed and optimized for playing the regulatory game."

2003-01-21-teledone

"Why does radio sound [...] like it's been prepped, packaged and served up in easy-to-digest bites, like tiny bits of Spam stuck on toothpicks?"

"Who needs radio anymore? You do, when it's good. Because there is something that radio can do that you can never do. Sure, you can download your entire CD collection onto your iPod and walk around with it. But those are the songs in your library, and even in random play there is a certain joyless satiety to that. The magic of radio long has been and will continue to be: You're alone in your car, flipping the dial, and, every so often, at exactly the right moment, exactly the right song comes on the radio. It makes you slap the steering wheel with happiness. The serendipity is spellbinding."

2003-01-21-fmxm

earl 8006 days AGO
serendipity, sehr schoen ...

Bruno Bord 8006 days AGO
Especially on FM radios, serendipity is quite a rare event... It depends so much on your musical tastes and feelings.
That's why I never listen to radio anymore. Never been struck by serendipity for such a long time... My portable CD player is much more reliable.

tobi 8006 days AGO
ad rss-tv: very nice, mr langreiter. it will perfectly fit with that wizard called rumpelstiltskin. just some minor notes: why not adding an item's date as dc:pubdate and why not linking an item to a detailed view of the item (ie. the item source)?

the general use of one and the same url for each item is imho generally problematic, because items cannot be told apart from each other with certainty, anymore (titles and/or descriptions won't do it reliably). i think that is why they implemented guid in rss 2.0 (or whatever version they like to call it). well, a url is definitely a good identifier (the u in url stands for unique, but i am lying to you :)

chris 8006 days AGO
I see some rumpelpatterns here and there ... Thank you very much for your suggestions, they are good. The nURLs are a temporary annoyance until I've decided where/what to link to. I'll read up on RSS 2.0 today and then add dc:pubdate and maybe even more if appropriate (XMLTV programme items sometimes contain credit information like actors etc.).

tobi 8006 days AGO
oh, probably for rss 2.0 that pubdate element is called somewhat different. dave...?

one last question: what is the source for the tv programmes?

chris 8006 days AGO
? > Gottfried Szing > XMLTV

chris 8006 days AGO
BTW, Tobi: The "item source" is a 2MB XML file, so linking to that won't make much sense, neither won't printing the REBOL object the information is ultimately stored in ;-) Do you have any suggestions wrt/ what useful information we could auto-assemble about a given programme?

tobi 8005 days AGO
i guess what you need for each item is a url of a nice html document showing some detailed information about the programme.

however, that's probably what i did not get so far: where does the information in the xml file come from (i might be short-sighted or at least too busy but i did not find any information about that diagonally reading through the xmltv page)...

if you (or whoever) scrape a tv guide like, uhm, tv.orf.at you should get good urls to use in the rss items. but i assume the source xml comes from a third party and probably they should revamp their output...?

(i did not intend to nag nag nag, chris. this is great stuff and it's sometimes just so hard to write small-talk only :)

chris 8005 days AGO
I've e-asked Gottfried Szing whom he's scraping ;-) I'll try to get permission from The Source to use the description texts in a non-commercial setting. The texts are equivalent to those of eurotv.com, which in turn seems to get the listing data from third parties as well. Oh, the cross-syndication ...

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