ActoRss Again

After some recent downtime, ActoRss is now fully functioning. For anyone who is unaware, it is a system to get an RSS feed for the latest films an actor has appeared in (or will appear in).

I took the opportunity to rework the original code, with the following improvements:

1. Faster – Although still a little on the slow side (due to the proxy nature of screen scraping), this version is much faster than the previous.
2. Error Correction – If you mispell an actor’s name, it will try to find the nearest, most relevant match.
3. Atom Enabled – You can now get your feed in the Atom format. Although I’m unhappy with some of the constraints Atom places on such a simple feed (modified and issued dates are unknown and irrelevant), I’d rather leave it up to the users to pick their format.
4. Directors – You can now also get feeds for directors, sound engineers, visual effects supervisors… If they’ve warranted a page on imdb, you can get a feed for them.

Now, I know that those last two improvements make a mockery of the name (since it’s now no longer solely about actors and RSS), it just seemed like the obvious extension to the existing version. Hope people enjoy it.