CineCartazPublico - RSS Mixer Prototype

It's amazing how people in Portugal still aren't aware of the possibilities provided by RSS. You'd be surprised by the number of respectable newspapers who go online but forget to add an RSS feed. Anyway, things are starting to change. Publico now has got an RSS feed. Unfortunately, the CineCartaz doesn't. It's the newspaper's movie theaters section. My wife asked me to make her a widget so she can see what movies are on theatres from her startpage. I've been postponing her request for quite a while now, but then I discovered feed43, and everything changed. Making feeds from webpages finally became a lot easier ...

feed43 is a web2.0 service that allows to turn old webpages with no feeds on them into cool RSS sharing machines. Basically, it allows to perform web-scraping via pattern matching expressions a-la-regexp served on top of a web-based interface. It really works well and it's quite easy to cope with, as long as you're familiarized with regexps.



Here's the only serious coding I add to do

<td width="456" class="fundoEscuro">{%}</td>{*}<td width="11" rowspan="3">{*}De: {%}<br>{*}Com: {%}<br>{*}<br>{%}<br>

So I had this page I wanted to turn into an RSS feed. In 5 to 10 minutes with feed43 and I had a nice RSS feed available. Neat. Unfortunately, this old php generated web-page only shows 11 movies going on per page. And Lisbon is the city capital, so I needed at least another 4 identical RSS feeds, one for each page. So I made them. It's too bad that feed43 doesn't let "save as" any previous work under a different name while keeping the original. That way I would only have had to change the input URL. But that's ok. 4 times 4 minutes and I required a little over 15 minutes to complete my task. Good thing that there aren't over 100 movies going on in Lisbon theatres.
But before actually summoning a startpage widget from these feeds I would still need to glue them together. So I used RSS mixer, the simplified version of Yahoo! Pipes. It automagically provides you with an embeddable xhtml widget, an iphone webpage link and an Apple widget. Sweet! ;)



Anyway, you can now check out the feed here; it might come in handy if you ever get to come visit Lisbon someday (no really, if you need a movie widget to do tourism, then you're hopeless ... ).