Friday, January 05, 2007

Tofu Torrents - My first ruby on rails application

A friend of mine wants to download The Colbert Report every time it is shown (it is not available on uk tv) and asked me for a technical solution. I told him about RSS and the automatic downloading features in most of the popular bittorrent clients, however the problem with the RSS feeds available on most torrent sites is that they contain duplicates.
I decided it would be a fun hack to create an rss filter removes the duplicates from the feed. I had also coincidently just begun learning ruby. It was also Christmas, time of indulgence followed by bloat. The result is tofu.

Tofu is a tv aggregator, gathering tidbits information about tv shows from around the world wide web and cook them together into one pleasing whole.
Tofu is currently 0.2 releases old. Tofu can
  • Retrieve information about past and upcoming episodes of "The Colbert Report" from tv.com
  • Retrieve Colbert Report torrents from mininova
  • Combine the two together
  • Output an rss feed of torrents, without duplicate episodes
You can visit tofu at http://tofu.gandrew.com

Some meaty code and stuff coming soon...
[Update: 24/04/07: For the inquisitive, the code is now available. I'm working on a new version in the v4 branch to be released sometime soon]

1 comments:

srushe said...

Any chance of seeing the code then? You know you want too :) A few other Northern Ireland Rails developers are interested in something similar...