• The BBC logo
• The iPlayer logo
• The BBC One logo
• The BBC News logo
• The News at Ten logo
• A 15 second video TV station identifier.

Not sure if thats right or wrong, just something to think about.

There really isn’t too much different than the old one from the face of it, but underneath its brand spanking new and loads cleaner. This is mainly thanks to iplayer now outputting Atom feeds. Thanks for that :)

One of the coolest things I’m working on is the idea that a user can sign in and subscribe to a given series. It’s actually up and running now, but not really ready for the whole world yet. Here is a link to what I’m currently watching on iPlayer.

Now that sort of thing opens the door to a whole raft of cool code writing fun. Suggestions welcome btw.

What does this mean for iPlayerlist? Well, I’m not sure, I still use my little site as I do like the lo-finess but to be honest, the new iPlayer site is much better for everybody else.

Perhaps I should change the tagline to “making the unmissable, slightly shitter”?

Should I bother continuing to maintain it?

The popularity of the features iPhone and iPod version of iplayerlist is making me think that I should. The fact that most users of the site are using these apple products is rather interesting. Getting linked from apple.com must have done something (grin), but the fact that they keep returning must mean its doing something right.

So I’m torn. Should I go on to try something else, or try and fix this for more devices and other such shenanigans?

mibly.com/radiofall

What is it using I hear you bellow?

• Ruby – well what else?
• xmpp4r gem – for connecting to the xmpp server and parsing the messages
• json gem – for outputting the messages in …. json
• jQuery – to make all those Ajax requests

The next steps are to add some intelligence into the script, interacting with some APIs or something. I have a few ideas, but it depends upon time and if I can get somebody to help with design.

require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-growl'
require 'xmpp4r-simple'

username = 'myusername'
password = 'password'
domain = 'hug.hellomatty.com'
im = Jabber::Simple.new("#{username}@#{domain}", password)
im.status(:chat, 'Hello world')

#  This bit just adds a few radio stations.  Should only be run once for your user
#
#  %w(radio1 radio2 radio3 radio4 5live 6music radio7 1xtra).each do |r|
#    im.add("#{r}@#{domain}")
#  end

g = Growl.new "localhost", "ruby-growl", ["ruby-growl Notification"], nil, "growl"
i = 0
while true
  i+=1
  if im.connected? == true
    im.presence_updates.each do |friend, old_presence, new_presence|
      if new_presence != nil
        puts "#{friend.gsub("@#{domain}", '')} #{new_presence}"
        g.notify("ruby-growl Notification", friend.gsub("@#{domain}", ''), new_presence)
      end
    end
  else
    puts '**************************** disconnected *************************'
    im = Jabber::Simple.new("#{username}@#{domain}", password)
    im.status(:chat, 'Hello world')
  end
  sleep(2)
  if i == 10
    # reconnect every now and then as we seem to be having odd issues.  a bug really
    im.reconnect
    i = 0
  end
end

Here is some sample output.

radio3: Details from bbc.co.uk/radio3 or call 08700 100 300.
1xtra: 1Xtra Dancehall Show - Robbo Ranx. Txt 88111 [network rates apply].
radio4: The World Tonight. Web - bbc.co.uk/news
radio2: Mark Lamarr. Mark presents the Shake, Rattle and Roll Show.
5live: Richard Bacon: Lively and provocative discussion regarding the day's key stories

Now I have no idea what I can do with this (twitter posting is already done to death), so I might have a think about this sort of thing. Be fun if it makes it into production.

There is a slight problem that is getting on my nerves a little. When you want to view an episode you are redirected to bbc.co.uk/iplayer. I had to do this as the iPlayer site uses mp4 embeds that are protected by a couple of layers of user agent strings and cookie validation. So, although I attempted a some rather hackey iframes, a link to iPlayer seemed to be the best option.

Building this version which emulates the iPhone system ui made me want to build a version using the Apple Touch SDK. I fear that getting my head around Objective-C might just take too much time. Would be damn cool though.

Anyhow give this a go and see what you think of it.

Its a shame the little Wii cant handle anything more than Flash 7, as its a bit blocky and clunky for video playback, worth a try though. Just point your Wii at http://iplayerlist.mibly.com.

Update
I’ve put a PS3 user agent look up in there too. So PS3 users can have a play, a la ps3iplayer.com

I started to build iPlayerlist as I wasn’t a fan of the original bbc.co.uk/iplayer site. It didn’t group episodes by series, rather graphics heavy and required too much clicking about for my liking. So over a Christmas, I began writing some code that would give me something I would use, but also as a vehicle to play around with some APIs that are about.

I’m happy with the result in that I use it and have learned stuff through developing. If anybody else uses it, its a bonus.

Anyhow, “Whats in the pot?” I hear you ask. Well here are the services the site uses.

• BBC iPlayer site
• BBC /programmes
• Youtube API
• Google Blog Search
• Akismet

These services all contribute in a way. The BBC iPlayer site is screen scraped (yeah I know, I know, but there are no RSS feeds or API yet so I had to). We grab a little more information from /programmes relating to each episode such as descriptions and broadcast dates. Then for each series we search youtube via its API for related videos. We then get some related blog posts via Google Blog Search. These blog results are passed through Akismet to reduce the spam, then moderated by myself.

For all this to happen Rails 2.0.2 handles the donkey work with the following

• Hpricot, for xml and iPlayer page parsing
• Mofo, for microformat parsing on /programmes
• YUI CSS Grids
• jQuery for progressive enhancement-ness

There is loads more I could ramble on about here, but I’ll leave that for another post.