I listen to To Kit’s Summit radio show on CR1. There is a text version, which is more like a summary of the show.
Commercial Radio’s website is just so 1990s. Funny thing all the websites of local media are pretty much alike for being backward, taking no note of web standards, usability and new technologies. None of the TV or radio stations presently provide their programme listings on their website in a very usable format.
As a small learning exercise I put together a simple Python script to “screen scrap” the Summit text version and convert it to an RSS feed. Now that I subscribe to it in my RSS newsreader I don’t have to load the page to see if there are any updates.
This is the first version, put together relatively quickly. It is an old-style CGI script, does no caching and sucks the text from CR’s website everytime it is loaded, so is quite a resource hog. I’ll be doing a new version so it does caching and run under a more efficient architecture e.g. mod_python.
Meanwhile, enjoy.