It's time for the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival. Last year, I saw somewhere around 30 movies. This year, I think I might be able to do around 50. I've put some hurdles in my way like deciding to go into work most of the days of the festival, and maybe I won't see the midnight movies like I might have when I was younger.
I spent some time going through SIFF's festival website, and got somewhat impatient and frustrated with what it provided me, so I pulled down the data of movies I was (somewhat?) interested in.
SIFF's website lets you add movies to "MySIFF", which is then presented in one page of scrapable HTML. I used the Python "Beautiful Soup" tool to find the appropriate chunk of data inside the HTML file, then I carved out individual chunks of data that I wanted to track. I bundled those bits back up and sent everything out to a CSV file, which Google Sheets (or "Google Docs Spreadsheets", as I call it) was happy to import.
I did a tiny bit of special-case formatting in my script so that the movie "808" renders as a string instead of an integer. I didn't special-case that movie, but I did recognize that there might be titles that get interpreted as integers.
Next Up(?) - constraint satisfaction to help me understand when I should see a particular screening of a movie (movie A conflicts with movie B now, but movie A is only showing now, but movie B has no conflicts next Tuesday, therefore, movie A is the better option now).
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