Archival repost — originally published on my old blog on January 18, 2009. Lightly cleaned up for dev.to (translated from French; I also dropped my personal TVRage feed hash from the example URL rather than repost a token — TVRage itself shut down years ago anyway). Netvibes and iGoogle are both long gone as platforms and the UWA widget format died with them, but the "aggregate a messy feed into something clean" approach still holds up.
Originally this project was meant for the same rabbit from my Nabaztag hack, but I ended up wanting to play with Netvibes' UWA widget framework instead. This widget shows the air times for the TV shows I watch regularly.
I'm a sucker for mashups, so instead of manually listing out every show, I used a service from TVRage. Once you created a TVRage account and added your favorite shows to it, TVRage gave you a personalized RSS feed of everything airing during the current week.
The feed was pretty messy — hard to work with, the items were inconsistent in structure — so aggregating it into the shape I wanted took more effort than expected.
Wanting to get the widget working as fast as possible, I wrote a small PHP5 API that aggregates the feed and sorts the data properly. You could also use the UWA/JS parser that Netvibes provided directly, and that's honestly the better approach — as it stood, the widget depended on an API I'd written and hosted on one of my own sites. But it didn't matter much: I wasn't planning to distribute the widget, so the PHP solution worked fine for my own use.
The widget takes three parameters: the tid and hash you'd find in your own personalized feed URL, and a third one pointing at my API.
Nothing about this stack survives today — Netvibes, iGoogle, TVRage, and UWA are all gone — but "aggregate a messy feed into a clean personal widget" is a shape I still reach for.
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