Tele.vision
I’m a huge tv-show fan. I watch them because of the story, the dialogue, the characters, the visuals and much much more. I love seeing how The Doctor saves the world, or how the war for the throne in Westeros rages on. Or anxiously waiting if my favorite character is getting killed off in The Walking Dead.
I love all of that stuff, and I try to stay up to date. But if you watch a lot of shows that is a hard thing to do. So one day I set out to do just that, I wanted to build an app that kept track of it for me. Before everyone bombards me with links to apps that do this let me tell you that I’ve tried them and still use them, but I like building stuff so I wanted to do this myself.
When doing research I noticed something: There aren’t any decent API’s for this. So far I know of 2 services that provide data for television shows: TVDB and TVrage. Both of them using XML.
Now I don’t know about you but when building apps using an API I prefer JSON, it feels faster, is easier to use and is pretty much a global standard. I don’t know why both of those services still haven’t provided an option for JSON output.
This got me thinking: If it doesn’t exist, why not build it myself? And that’s exactly what I plan on doing. I want to build a database that is completely open, free to edit, read, and more importantly, use.
So why did I write this post? This is a big project and while I think I’m a capable developer, I don’t think it’s something I should be doing alone. That’s why I plan on open sourcing this, from design to development and to release. Anyone can join me, your voice and insights will be very much appreciated.
Here is a github link for those interested.
