2021-05-20-tv-shows-web-feeds.html (2947B) - raw

      1 <!-- title: Follow TV shows with web feeds -->
      2 <!-- slug: tv-shows-web-feeds -->
      3 <!-- categories: FOSS, Projects -->
      4 <!-- date: 2021-05-20T19:19:00Z -->
      5 
      6 <p>
      7   I am quite strict about which messages make it to a push notification on my phone. I don't like to
      8   receive notifications unless they are important or urgent. The same thing happens with emails—indeed,
      9   it's one of the few applications which have notifications enabled. However, I also don't want to
     10   regularly check different places for updates. Because of this, most of the updates I receive are
     11   through another channel: web feeds.</p>
     12 <!-- /p -->
     13 
     14 <p>
     15   <a href="/blog/2020/04/use-web-feeds/">I have written before</a> about using web feeds (Atom, RSS,
     16   JSON feed...) to keep track of updates to sites. I use my feed reader to get updates about some of
     17   the software I use, YouTube videos, newsletters, and, of course, blogs. They are all things I
     18   don't want to miss out on, but I don't want to be notified about. Instead, Miniflux (my feed
     19   reader) stores them until I decide to log in and read them. This allows me to disable any
     20   notifications but have them all centralized in one place.</p>
     21 <!-- /p -->
     22 
     23 <p>
     24   Lately, many TV shows are starting to air again, meaning that there are new episodes weekly of
     25   some series that I am watching, and soon more will follow. Because of this, I want to keep up to
     26   date with which TV series are coming up, but I don't want push notifications or emails (or
     27   checking their websites). I just want a way to know that there are new episodes for me to watch,
     28   but without the hassle of looking it up... Ring a bell? Web feeds!</p>
     29 <!-- /p -->
     30 
     31 <p>
     32   Yesterday I quickly looked around to see if there was any service offering that for free or
     33   cheaply, and there was none. The ones I saw were about 5€/month, which is more than any other
     34   service I use (a small VPS, email provider or Miniflux). I was not willing to pay that much, and I
     35   was motivated enough to do such a service myself, it sounded like a fun and easy project to take
     36   on for a day or two, so I did.</p>
     37 <!-- /p -->
     38 
     39 <p>
     40   Luckily, <a href="https://www.tvmaze.com">TVmaze</a> offers a free API with all the information I
     41   needed, and there I went with a Python script. After some time, I had it running, and today I
     42   polished it a bit. I can say it is fully working now!</p>
     43 <!-- /p -->
     44 
     45 <p>
     46   The script takes TV series IDs (as many as you want) and creates an Atom feed with an entry for
     47   each episode there is. Just run it as a cron job every hour and put the output on a static site,
     48   you're done! Alternatively, you can make one feed per show, so multiple people can subscribe to
     49   their desired shows.</p>
     50 <!-- /p -->
     51 
     52 <p>
     53   If you are interested, there is a bit more information about how it works <a href="/projects/tv2feed/">here</a>
     54   and the code is <a href="https://git.oscarbenedito.com/osf/file/tv2feed.py.html">here</a>.</p>
     55 <!-- /p -->