Another fine scrape.

April 1, 2006 1:37 PM

I have been scouring the web for a way to get easily-available local-area movie schedules via RSS. Yahoo, Google, and IMDB all present perfectly decent HTML of this information, and there is one My Yahoo to RSS service; sadly, it's ad hoc and frequently fails to set the localization cookie. What am I missing? This should be a revenue oppotunity for the studios and theaters - where is the sweet creamy RSS I crave?
posted by mwhybark to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If you're on a mac w/OSX 10.4, There are several widgets available. There's one I use that I think is called Movie Tracker (it's on my other machine and my daughter is on it, so I can't check now.) It works well enough for me.
posted by Mcable at 5:28 PM on April 1, 2006

Best answer: Find a solution for email-to-RSS that works for you (3rd party tool or the built-in feature for Bloglines, for instance). Then set up a Google Alert for a search like "movie:10001" where 10001 is your zip code. Each time new schedules are found, Google should send the alert to the email address specified which you have then set up to ping your RSS reader.
posted by superfem at 6:12 PM on April 1, 2006

Response by poster: With a server-side forward and MailBucket, I think email to RSS might just work. More when I finish tinkering.
posted by mwhybark at 6:28 PM on April 1, 2006

That's is absolutely incredible. I just logged on to AskMeFi to post this very same question.
posted by bjork24 at 6:36 PM on April 1, 2006

And yes, it was so incredible, I had to use "is" twice.
posted by bjork24 at 6:37 PM on April 1, 2006

Response by poster: Shoot, it doesn't look like it's working. The Alert is providing me different results than "movie: theatres Seattle" brings up when you do it via the UI, which redirects to http://google.com/movies/ before appending the query string.

Results as delivered via Alerts. (I had to fudge the "movie:" term to keep the redirect from happening).

Results as delivered via UI.
posted by mwhybark at 4:41 PM on April 2, 2006