New Feed - movie trailers RSS (beta)
I am a fan of movie trailers. That sounds a little odd to some people, but I really enjoy the anticipation I get from watching a good trailer. One of my favorite sites to check out trailers is apple trailers. They have a good, up to date selection of trailers all viewable in quicktime. The downside is that they don’t have an RSS feed. So I made one.
I built a screen scraper that parses the site and looks for all of their latest releases and outputs it into rss, then uploads it to polymercode.com. The feed is very much in Beta, so don’t be surprised if it isn’t readable by your RSS reader. Also - I am going to schedule the reader to scrape the trailers web site only a couple times a day - so don’t be surprised if the feed it slightly out of date with what is actually on the site.
I would appreciate your comments, and any errors you find. I’m going to release the source code for the application once it’s stablized and production ready - so keep checking back if you’re interested.
July 29th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Hey Kevin!
I too am a avid trailer watcher and I’m excited about your RSS reader. However I can’t get it to work on Bloglines. It comes up but none of the links work. Is there something I am doing wrong?
Megan
July 29th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
Glad you like it Megan!
I’ve isolated and corrected the problem you were having - it was totally not your fault. It was the result of a last minute ‘optimization’ gone awry.
There are 2 known issues right now -
1) I don’t seem to be ignoring commented html. So some links like the link to the high-definition Serenity trailer that doesn’t work - shouldn’t even be there since it’s commented out on apple - probably for a reason.
2) The second issue is the post dates. They all seem to be in 1970 - probably because of the quirkiness of the Java Date class. I’ll try to fix these this weekend.
Glad to hear you’re (trying to) use it Megan.
Thanks for letting me know about your issues!!! Let me know if you find any others.
Kevin
August 2nd, 2005 at 2:38 pm
…Apple Trailers Now Has an RSS Feed
August 2nd, 2005
My buddy Kevin has written a screen-scraper that reads the Apple Trailers homepage and creates an RSS 2.0 feed of the results…
August 2nd, 2005 at 10:20 pm
Glad to hear you like it too Jay!
http://blog.inkbase.com/?p=45
I’ve just finished version 0.2 now - It’s automated. I’ve used Ant build.xml scripts to generate an executable jar file that does all the parsing. Then I configured Windowz XP Scheduler to automate execution of the jar. I’m still tweaking the frequency.
Next steps are concurring the date bug and the comments for version 0.3 due later this week.
0.4 will include some server side caching stuff (on my side) to eliminate unnecessary ftp uploads.
So there’s a bit of a work to do to get to version 1.0. Once 1.0 is ready I’ll release the source code for download. So keep checking back.