The digital tv

Does anyone else notice that we are pretty much slaves to the t.v channel schedules ,If a show comes on that you cant watch because of when it comes on or what channel it comes on you have a few choices

• find the correct time to watch it or 
• record it later
• find it online

but what if the television actually acted like it was manufactured in the 21st
century....where is the dynamic broadcasts?
where is the create my own channel?
how about t.v API's?
nothing its like everyone has forgotten about the boobtube.


Am i the only one who looks at a tv and sees a possiblity of endless creativity

so for example lets say you want to watch cartoons but its 4am and they are no cartoons at 4am
wouldnt it be so nice if i could ask the channel directly for certain cartoons.
and maybe create a small channel based off the cartoons that were on the previous day or maybe even
the next day. even search for a cartoon that aired a few days ago that you missed.

i mean think about this do you watch a channel or a show...for me its mostly the show
you dont turn on the t.v and say "i wonder whats on USA or SyFi"
no you flip through the channels or a guide hopeing to find something to catch your interest
and if you see something you like your stuck on that channel.

sure tvs of today have app and web connectivity...but its just another computer.
theres nothing innovative about it...at all

and yes we do have websites like netflix and hulu that offer whole shows you can watch
on your computer or stream to your t.v but like I said its just another computer

ScraperWiki

Scraping is considered by most a devious or malicious art that is only for those who wish to steal data, However this is not true, the problem is most websites offer great data however lack a real nice way of getting just the data. Some of the websites offer an api but most dont so what can you do?

Well you could manually visit each website and extract the data yourself...OR  you could write a program todo it for you maybe in something like pthon or maybe php even javascript and that would be all fine and dandy OR you could have the cloud scrape for you...Enter Scraperwiki.

One of the best scraper services on the web allowing you to leverage python, ruby and even php to write scrapers that you can manage and run when you need it or let it run daily so you have the latest data

Either way you spin it if you want to scrape some data and want a great online

service to manage it look no further then Scraperwiki

Want a small example?

The only thing you need to worry about is choosing which library your going to use

for python you can choose from

• lxml
• html5lib
• Beautiful Soup
• Beautiful Soup v4
• ..so many more

and ruby offers

• Nokogiri
• Hpricot
• LibXML
• mechanize
• ...a few more

and php offers only a few

all languages implement a library called Scraperwiki that expose a number of functions that will also help you. 

Ill admit when I started writing this post I only knew of a few of these features and they have alot more...more then I can explain just head on over and start grabbing data today.

Reddit Link grabber

Here is a small script I wrote to extract links from reddit its not bullet-proof but the point was to avoid regular expression
and rely on CSS Selectors. I also chose to use Sizzle because it gives the power of jquerys selectors minus all the stuff we dont need

SOPA & PIPA

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill - PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House - to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit's lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

because of this I urge any site that is not already fighting sopa and pipa todo immediiatly.
by going to http://sopastrike.com