Automating Your Life #1 — Getting Notified When Your Favourite Movie is Out (via ShoutOUT Lite)
ShoutOUT Lite was released a couple of hours ago (as of writing) and this gave me an excuse to mess around with an old project of mine I did called ‘movie-notifier’.
To the uninitiated, ShoutOUT Lite is ShoutOUT Lab’s SMS API for Developers, which aims to be more of a pay-as-you-go and streamlined approach to the whole SMS-sending shebang, allowing you to also easily manage sender IDs and view logs and statistics from an easy to use dashboard.
Back when Deadpool was all the craze and amazing and you just had to watch the movie, I really wanted to be able to get notified as soon as tickets were available so I could watch it with my best-friend. I didn’t want spend most of my time refreshing the page just to be able to, so, like any hacker/developer would do, I decided to automate the whole thing.
I tend to prefer Savoy to MC when it comes to movies, just because <retracted>, so I snooped around the EAP Movies website, looking for ways I could extract the current movies being played. Anybody who knew me well enough would know that I absolutely loathe scraping websites and would only resort to it as a last measure, so with persistence, I found a little URL endpoint that just responded with movie names wrapped in HTML (which was used to fill that little list box you use when trying to select a movie to purchase tickets for) and that was enough for me.
A couple of hours after and I had finished a rather crude, but functional script that worked, which would notify us via a telegram bot and put it up on my server.
It worked. I bought tickets and we enjoyed the movie (although the popcorn was a tad bit overpriced if you ask me). I’d say it was well worth the effort I had put into being notified of it.
As per usual, I then turned it into a module so anybody could plug it in and play with it.
It’s as easy as cake .. or pie, or cheesecake or .. well, you get the idea.
Now Telegram may be the most open and easiest way to integrate into, but not a lot of people used Telegram, and there weren’t many platforms to do this with (at the time, Facebook Bot API wasn’t released yet, but if you ask me: Telegram Bots > Facebook Bots). WhatsApp was out of the question unless you really wanted to get banned, not many people actively check their emails, quite a few percentage of people had Twitter accounts, and the only other solution was SMS. With most SMS gateways, it was a hit or miss, and in my case, it was constantly a miss. Either you had to pay high monthly fees or the API was either insecure-ish, too simple or too unusable, and didn’t seem to suite my little side projects.
ShoutOUT Lite seemed to hit the right balance for me and thus, I tried it again.
.. and lo and behold it works. My movie-notifier module is still a bit buggy though (if you think you can make it better/more efficient, I’d absolutely love a pull-request), but I’m satisfied with what I have currently.
I’d even consider turning this into a full fledged web-app where you could set which movies you’d like to get notified of when the tickets are available, and would handle all that for you.
