commit 3a418e2dfb65640382d16de4fe1163df183ae959
parent b2fbb2e45a92e82ca3d824a92f7ffc246d4526d2
Author: Oscar Benedito <oscar@oscarbenedito.com>
Date: Thu, 20 May 2021 21:20:28 +0200
New entry: Follow TV shows with web feeds
Diffstat:
1 file changed, 51 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/blog/2021-05-20-tv-shows-web-feeds.md b/content/blog/2021-05-20-tv-shows-web-feeds.md
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+<!-- title: Follow TV shows with web feeds -->
+<!-- slug: tv-shows-web-feeds -->
+<!-- categories: FOSS, Projects -->
+<!-- date: 2021-05-20T19:19:00Z -->
+
+I am quite strict about which messages make it to a push notification on my
+phone. I don't like to receive notifications unless they are important or
+urgent. The same thing happens with emails—indeed, it's one of the few
+applications which have notifications enabled. However, I also don't want to
+regularly check different places for updates. Because of this, most of the
+updates I receive are through another channel: web feeds.
+
+[I have written before][feeds] about using web feeds (Atom, RSS, JSON feed...)
+to keep track of updates to sites. I use my feed reader to get updates about
+some of the software I use, YouTube videos, newsletters, and, of course, blogs.
+They are all things I don't want to miss out on, but I don't want to be notified
+about. Instead, Miniflux (my feed reader) stores them until I decide to log in
+and read them. This allows me to disable any notifications but have them all
+centralized in one place.
+
+Lately, many TV shows are starting to air again, meaning that there are new
+episodes weekly of some series that I am watching, and soon more will follow.
+Because of this, I want to keep up to date with which TV series are coming up,
+but I don't want push notifications or emails (or checking their websites). I
+just want a way to know that there are new episodes for me to watch, but without
+the hassle of looking it up... Ring a bell? Web feeds!
+
+Yesterday I quickly looked around to see if there was any service offering that
+for free or cheaply, and there was none. The ones I saw were about 5€/month,
+which is more than any other service I use (a small VPS, email provider or
+Miniflux). I was not willing to pay that much, and I was motivated enough to do
+such a service myself, it sounded like a fun and easy project to take on for a
+day or two, so I did.
+
+Luckily, [TVmaze][] offers a free API with all the information I needed, and
+there I went with a Python script. After some time, I had it running, and today
+I polished it a bit. I can say it is fully working now!
+
+The script takes TV series IDs (as many as you want) and creates an Atom feed
+with an entry for each episode there is. Just run it as a cron job every hour
+and put the output on a static site, you're done! Alternatively, you can make
+one feed per show, so multiple people can subscribe to their desired shows.
+
+If you are interested, there is a bit more information about how it works
+[here][tv2feed] and the code is [here][code].
+
+
+[feeds]: </blog/2020/04/use-web-feeds/> "Use web feeds! - oscarbenedito.com"
+[TVmaze]: <https://www.tvmaze.com>
+[tv2feed]: </projects/tv2feed/>
+[code]: <https://git.oscarbenedito.com/osf/file/tv2feed.py.html>
