iPlayerlist map

So here is the first thing I’ve managed to get out of Opencalais. Its not really that interesting but a few people seem to like it.

So what you are looking at is all the programmes on iPlayer whose synopsis contains something that is of geographical importance. Now thanks to Opencalais’ new beta we get the longitutude and latitude of a given point (without it, you would have to use something like GeoNames) hence a point on the map. Simple really.

Whats in the mix?

• All the same old iPlayerlist stuff, DB, html scraping, and what have you.
• Httparty – makes dealing with restful APIs rather interesting.
• Google maps.
• Facebox – for the lightbox thing.

So its another dumb map mashup. Now the real question is does it add anything new for the user? Well I’m not sure. I’m going to add a few colours to the markers, and output the geolocations in KML if I get the time.

Opencalais + iPlayerlist

Opencalais is one of those Web 3.0 (sorry) services which is really rather interesting. Basically if you throw plain text at it will return the concepts it finds. For example it would recognise the Royal Albert Hall as a place and London as a city. The output is in RDF, yay.

As you might have guessed I’m thwacking the data from iPlayerlist (which is essentially bbc.co.uk/programmes) through it and see what we get.

Well its made me giggle. You get some cool stuff like programmes relating to Cities, People and Nations, but also some rather random topics. Medical Conditions is my favorite, you would be surprised how many programmes pop up in that topic.

So keep you eye out, it won’t be long before you will be able to subscribe to iPlayer shows relating to “sore throats” :)

iPlayerlist is back, less sucky and smells of lemon

Ok, I was stunned by the new iPlayer site to such a degree that I let iPlayerlist die for a bit. However, after a few people got in touch asking me to carry on I thought I best had do. So its back!

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.

iPlayer v2 is wonderful!

I have to hand it to the people at the beeb who work on iPlayer. The new site is loads better and putting radio and TV together is what I really wanted to see more of. So well done all around, it’s brilliant.

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?

iPlayerlist gets a little love

Lots has happened since my last post. I’ve moved to a new server and suffered domain name issues. However on the positive side, I’ve had a little spring clean of iPlayerlist.

One of the big things I’ve added is the “featured episodes” on the front page. Now this is mostly powered by what appears on the front page of bbc.co.uk/iplayer. However, there is a little twist. The featured episodes are also powered by the reviews posted upon the rather ace Watchification blog. When an episode gets mentioned by that blog it will become featured, and a link to the review will appear on the episode page. Thanks to the people there for letting me do this :)

Thats about it for now. In the next week or so I’ll be putting up a re-factored version of the back end, which should get rid of those annoying bugs that keep cropping up. Or I might do a bit of it at the BBC Mashed event.

iPod and iPhone version of iPlayerlist

Over a friday night I rebuilt iPlayerlist iPhone templates so that it uses Joe Hewitt’s iui. The result is quick to navigate, no silly pinch zooming to get what I want. Just point your iphone/ipod at iplayerlist.mibly.com.

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.

Time for a Wii

I got hold of a Wii this weekend, mainly because of Mariokart but also so I could faff around with its browser. The result is iPlayerlist for the Wii (thank you BBC). Again, its work in progress and consider it to be my programming play thing rather than a fully fledged service.

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

A little about BBC iPlayer, youtube and playing

Its nice to have a project that you dabble with as a hobby. A project that even if it fails, you won’t lose cash, job, respect or pets over and can only really gain through lessons learned. Currently, my hobby project is iPlayerlist.

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.