A long time ago, I joined the X-Philes. I promptly forgot about it, since everything was working well. Recently, I came across another website dicussing various matters about XHTML and markup: Anne van Kesteren.

Among other things, I learned that I could improve my content negotiation. Thanks to Ben for providing the correct user agents, I’m now one step closer to perfection.

Update: Because I never really bothered checking old entries before the mime type switch in May, there were a few broken archive pages. That won’t stand. I went through the entire archive and fixed the few entries that didn’t work. One step closer…

Next step: using an xml stylesheet processing instruction. (Yawn).

I tweaked my UGC RSS feed creator to include a few cinemas that I apparently missed. It should now cover every UGC cinema in the UK and Ireland. While I was at it, I also added information about the director and actors in each film to the description (if you want a plot synopsis, just follow the link on each item).

I also was about to change the mime-type from text/xml to application/rss+xml, but to do that I’d need to generate a link to the feed, rather than take the user straight to the feed. This is, of course, pretty easy to do. Unfortunately, I’m knee deep in coding something else, so it’ll have to wait.

The thing about most polished twisting films is that the twists have become far too cliched. Confidence, starring Ed Burns and Rachel Weisz, is one such film.

The plot isn’t important here, it’s more the predictability that should be focused on. If you’ve seen a few films like this, you’ll know what to expect. Con artist gets himself into a jam, gets himself out of jam (almost), things seem to go horribly wrong, it was all part of the real plan that’s been hinted at all along. Yawn! By now, we all know that “throwaway” dialogue in these films is usually an indication that something important is going on. Same with various framing techniques. If you ever see an actor giving an over the shoulder look, think carefully about what’s going on.

So, maybe doing some media studies ruined this film for me, maybe it just wasn’t a great film. Either way, I’m sick of seeing predictable twists. Get some real imagination, Hollywood; surprise us all.

Ding, ding, ding; it’s time for another round of random links:

• Seven Deadly Sins Of Web Writing – The biggest mistakes you can make when writing for the web, the sort of mistakes that crop up again and again.
• Well behaved DHTML – Aaron Boodman writes a good article on unobtrusive, gracefully degrading DHTML. Very much a must read for javascripters.
• Nasubi – The Japanese took it too far with this game show. One day, someone will get an eye out.

I really should start one of those link-based side blogs.

I was at the UGC website the other day, looking at the listings for my nearest cinema for the billionth time this month. I suddenly had the thought that it would be great if I could get the show times in an RSS feed. Every day I could see what films are on, and what times they’re showing when checking my email and other RSS feeds.

So I checked the website. Unsurprisingly, they don’t provide any. The only way to get an RSS feed was to do it myself; my first adventure into screen scraping.

Now, screen scraping is a technique that is notoriously difficult to get right and keep right. It also doesn’t help that there aren’t any good tutorials on the subject (expect one soon). The basic idea is to look at a webpage and systematically grab the bits you want.

Long story short: the UGC Cinemas RSS feed creator is a way to generate an RSS feed for any UGC cinema in the UK. All comments are welcome, all feedback too.