Re: [backstage] Resources

[Duncan Barclay]

Ben Metcalfe wrote: -----Original Message----- For those of you interested http://www.bleb.org/tv/ provides XML listings of the all the major UK TV channels, this could be used in a number of ways within other BBC content! It's become apparent that there is a lot of merging of data from different sources such as Google, BBC etc. Would it be beneficial if the backstage site or an independent site started cataloging some of the resources which could be used? I realise that that the site currently lists prototyping and mostly internal BBC feeds but listings good external resources would be excellent. James. Hi James Your right - there are plenty of really good external resources out there. Remixing content from varying sources is certainly a good strategy to create a successful prototype. To that endeavour, we're certainly keen to list useful external feeds within our Feeds and API's pages (http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/). As you can appreciate, being an official BBC site, there are certain restrictions placed upon me as to what I can link to from backstage.bbc.co.uk. I'm not 100% of our position on bleb.org at this point in time (hey, it's 3am on a bank holiday!) but I'm pretty sure it's something we wouldn't be able to link to it if it scrapes it's content from a third-party provider (I *believe* it does - but let me know if you know better!) - I don't think there are any official, freely licenced/legel UK TV listing XML sources on the Internet at the moment. If you guys want to start compiling lists of useful resources and links like this on your own sites, I'll see if we can link to them. Let me know Cheers Ben Metcalfe :: backstage.bbc.co.uk Hi, Although not in XML format, Radio Times does have data that can be downloaded (although I don't know how official it is). The list of channels can be found at http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/channels.dat , and if you take the number of the channel and put it into the address like so: http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/92.dat (92 for BBC1), you can get listings for a while (looks like 2 weeks).  Unfortunately, there seems to be lots of separate bits of information in the file that I don't know the purpose of (one might be for working out if it is a film, etc). Shouldn't be too hard to use (assuming you want to) as it is effectively just a csv file but without commas, and you might even be able to list it on backstage.bbc.co.uk. Duncan PS. Apologies if this gets sent twice.  The first version I sent ran into some problems with Norton and then never appeared to make it to the list. PPS. Third time lucky maybe.  This time I have disabled norton's outgoing email scanning thing. PPPS. Fourth time?  Changed the SMTP server this time, which might help it work.  Looks like NTL's SMTP server wasn't working that well.  Again, apologies if this appears loads of times.