Mixtape Movies – Fandango

As promised I am posting a Mixtape Movies each week to give you an idea of what I have planned. For this first one as well as the final post I am going to quickly run through the process as it may help anyone unsure of what I was thinking.

I thought it would be fun to start with the movie that gave my blog its title: Fandango. Set over a single day during a time of transition for the young characters, Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti were obvious choices. I quickly added Stand By Me involving a younger group of friends. The journey they were on seemed appropriate to fandango and with Richard Dreyfuss it shares an interesting link to American Graffiti where he plays a similar character at a different time in his life.

For my final pick I was going to go for the quintessential high school movie; The Breakfast Club. I discounted it as a contemporary film and not a nostalgic one. It is also set indoors in winter where all the others are set outdoors in summer. I then considered: Animal House, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, Rebel Without A Cause, The Last Picture Show, Rushmore and Risky Business. Discounting all of these for one reason or another I went back to The Breakfast Club because it just fits, and that’s what matters in a mixtape. As we are translating an idea from music to movies, I have also lent towards movies with memorable music.

Finally my wildcard movie: Big Wednesday. Where all the other movies are set over a day or two Big Wednesday is set over a period of years and shows the transition not just the turning point in the life of the characters. So here is my first Movie Mixtape:

As promised I am posting a Mixtape Movies each week to give you an idea of what I have planned. For this first one as well as the final post I am going to quickly run through the process as it may help anyone unsure of what I was thinking.

I thought it would be fun to start with the movie that gave my blog its title: Fandango. Set over a single day during a time of transition for the young characters, Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti were obvious choices. I quickly added Stand By Me involving a younger group of friends. The journey they were on seemed appropriate to fandango and with Richard Dreyfuss it shares an interesting link to American Graffiti where he plays a similar character at a different time in his life.

For my final pick I was going to go for the quintessential high school movie; The Breakfast Club. I discounted it as a contemporary film and not a nostalgic one. It is also set indoors in winter where all the others are set outdoors in summer. I then considered: Animal House, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, Rebel Without A Cause, The Last Picture Show, Rushmore and Risky Business. Discounting all of these for one reason or another I went back to The Breakfast Club because it just fits, and that’s what matters in a mixtape. As we are translating an idea from music to movies, I have also lent towards movies with memorable music.

Finally my wildcard movie: Big Wednesday. Where all the other movies are set over a day or two Big Wednesday is set over a period of years and shows the transition not just the turning point in the life of the characters. So here is my first Movie Mixtape:

Source: http://fandangogroovers.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/mixtape-movies-fandango/

Need Fandango.com Movie Time Scraper

*******Urgent******** We need someone to code a script that scrapes fandango.com for movie times and brings up current and future times based off of zip code on fandango.com. Once the user picks a movie time we need it to pull the price that fandango charges and charge a certain percentage of what fandango charges. Then the script needs to be coded into a gateway or shopping cart on a merchant account so that we can charge credit cards. We need this done ASAP. If you can provide quality timely service you will be hired for 2-3 projects in the near future. We need this project done in the next 2-4 days. If we choose Your bid we will provide more info. PLEASE INCLUDE THE PHRASE "FUTURE MOVIES" IN YOUR BID/PM SO THAT WE KNOW YOU READ THE DESCRIPTION THOROUGHLY. *ALSO, AFTER PLACING YOUR BID PLEASE BE READY TO RESPOND PROMPTLY AS WE NEED TO START THIS PROJECT TODAY* Keywords: Web, PHP, Scraping



Source: http://www.donanza.com/jobs/p1842319-need_fandango_com_movie_time_scraper

Find movie times and locations wherever you are

Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets is an app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that lets you search for nearby theaters and movie start times from your mobile device.

Most people are familiar with Fandango's popular movie ticket purchasing service on the web. Now you can achieve the same results from your mobile device. Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets lets you browse movies, look for showtimes and even view trailers, no matter where you are or what you're currently doing.

If you're using your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can rate and review movies you've seen directly from Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets' interface so other Fandango users can see them. You can also post the same movie reviews to your Facebook wall through Facebook Connect and sync to your web-based Fandango account to view your purchased ticket history, among other things. You'll need a Fandango account already set up to do this. If you don't have one yet, no worries. The app will prompt you to create one after you install it.

If you're an iPad user, Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets also gives you quite a few extras. There's a category on the app called The Pulse that will show you where tickets to the movie you're considering purchasing were sold (at least via Fandango itself). It's arguable that this won't actually help you avoid huge crowds since Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets only shows you the tickets purchased through its own service. It's still an interesting feature.

Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets also allows you to filter movies by genre, MPAA rating and also the format, such as IMAX or 3D. You can also search Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets via a filter to find specific features available in theaters like closed captioning, stadium seating, and on-site arcades. Plus, watching movie trailers on Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets is a real treat on the iPad's gorgeous screen.

Fandango Movies - Times & Tickets is truly an excellent all-in-one theater and movie time locating app.
Recent changes

    Save time with Passbook! Now you can send & store your “Mobile Ticket” for participating theaters in Passbook & breeze into the theater (iPhone iOS 6 users only)
    General bug fixes & usability enhancements


Source: http://fandango.en.softonic.com/iphone

Fandango Discount Tickets: BOGO Friday Movie Tickets!

Score a great deal on movie tickets all summer with a Fandango discount tickets offer.  Now through August 12th, every Friday you can get Buy One Get One movie tickets if you are a Visa Signature card holder.

You may be surprised to see what cards you have that are Visa Signature cards.  My debit card from our bank is one, so I don’t really need a credit card to take part in the Fandango Offer.

Head over and pick which movie you want to see, enter your Visa card number and the discount will show at checkout.

The fine print:
Limit of one free movie ticket per visa card holder per 30 days.  The discount will only work for movies with a Friday show time.

Source: http://www.southernsavers.com/2013/04/fandango-discount-tickets-bogo-friday-movie-tickets/

What You Need To Know-Web Data Extraction Services

What is Web data extraction or scraping? This specialized software automatically obtains data from the Internet and places them into files for an end user. It executes a much-advanced function than search engines since it can handle HTML code. These extraction tools speed up the scanning and pulling of information that make evaluating accumulated information convenient for the person or company using the tool.

Harvesting techniques There are three techniques employed by these extraction programs. The first method is Web content harvesting and this is focused on collecting preferred content, such as HTML files, pictures, or emails. The second method, Web structure farming, takes advantage of the fact that web pages can give more information than merely their visible content. For example, links can offer information on a page’s popularity or give you a sense of the assortment of topics talked about in that page. The third method, web usage harvesting, provides an insight to user behavior. It also assesses the efficacy of the website’s framework.

Possible Functions These services are an important resource for businesses particularly those that promote their goods and services online. By means of extraction tools, companies can pull together information on competition, from prices to other vital data. For instance, by using Google suggest scraping tools you will be able to get thousand of keyword ideas from real user queries which you can use in your next marketing blog post, or to optimize your online marketing campaigns. Through the help of these extraction tools, you can collect and assess data that can help you formulate marketing strategies that have a great likelihood of success.

There are plenty of providers of Web scraping services, but some do a better job than others. It would be unwise to select the first one that offers their services. The firm that offers the least expensive package is also not automatically the best choice. Read up on their reputation and obtain references prior to making any commitments.

Source: http://www.webllena.com/what-you-need-to-know-web-data-extraction-services/

Easy web scraping with PHP

Web scraping is a technique of web development where you load a web page and "scrape" the data off the page to be used elsewhere. It's not pretty, but sometimes scraping is the only way to access data or content from a web site that doesn't provide RSS or an open API.

I'm not going to discuss the legal aspects of scraping, as it may be considered copyright infringement in some situations. However, there are also perfectly legal reasons to need to scrape, like if you have permission.

To make things really easy, we're going to let the power of regular expressions do all the work for us. If you're not familiar with regular expressions, you may want to google for a tutorial. Here is the documentation for PHP regular expression syntax.

First, we start off by loading the HTML using file_get_contents. Next, we use preg_match_all with a regular expression to turn the data on the page into a PHP array.

This example will demonstrate scraping this web site's blog page to extract the most recent blog posts. This is just for demo purposes - of course, the RSS feed is much better suited for this.

// get the HTML
$html = file_get_contents("http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/");

Here is what the HTML looks like for the blog posts:

<ul id="main">
    <li>
        <h1><a href="[link]">[title]</a></h1>
        <span class="date">[date]</span>
        <div class="section">
            [content]
        </div>
    </li>
</ul>

So we will use a regular expression that looks for all the li elements and capture the content using parentheses at the appropriate places (link, title, date & content).

preg_match_all(
    '/<li>.*?<h1><a href="(.*?)">(.*?)<\/a><\/h1>.*?<span class="date">(.*?)<\/span>.*?<div class="section">(.*?)<\/div>.*?<\/li>/s',
    $html,
    $posts, // will contain the blog posts
    PREG_SET_ORDER // formats data into an array of posts
);

foreach ($posts as $post) {
    $link = $post[1];
    $title = $post[2];
    $date = $post[3];
    $content = $post[4];

    // do something with data
}

There's a lot going on inside that regular expression, but there are really only a few "tricks" that are used. Anytime I want to say "skip over whatever is between" I use .*?. And any time I want to say "match whatever is in here" I use (.*?). And lastly, the s at the end tells PHP to allow the dot . to match newlines. That's about all there is to it.

The regular expression will only match blog posts, because they are the only <li> elements that contain an <h1>, <span class="date"> and <div class="section">.

Web scraping is highly unreliable - if the HTML structure were to change this code would break instantly. However, it's often quite easy to write this code, and usually produces a perfectly usable hack solution.

Source: http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/web-scrape-with-php-tutorial

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on web data scraping, website data scraping, web scraping services, data scraping services, website scraping, eBay product scraping, Forms Data Entry etc.

Web scraping software vs. hosted crawl solution

Web scraping is a widely known term these days; not just because so much data exists around us, but more because there's already so much being done with that data. Let's try to analyze the differences between opting for a software that comes with DIY components over picking a hosted data acquisition solution on a vendor's stack.

Scraping requirements can broadly be categorized into one-time and ongoing. These two needs further fork into large-scale vs. small-scale.

reasons of visualization, let's assume large-scale involves 100 websites ore more whereas small scale involves 5 or less.

One-time scraping requirements on a tool- Usually, with one-time needs, folks seek a do it yourself software since they wouldn't like to spend much time explaining their requirements to a vendor. This
works when you have really simple and few sources to deal with. You indicate the fields that you'd like scraped to the tool, press the submit button and after few minutes of background processing, you have your CSV files on the screen. Neat!

Challenges while using a tool- The problem changes when you add in few more websites, not all that simple, and have many more fields to collect. It's not unusual when you click on each field to be captured from every site on your list and then be annoyed by surprises after you have submitted your request. Worse though, sometimes the crawls would have progressed to 99% and failed thereafter leaving you in a wonderland. You wouldn't know if re-running it will solve the problem. So you shoot a question to the software's support center and wait to hear something like the site blocked their bots.

Vis-à-vis hosted solution- Let's compare this situation when you are on a hosted solution of a vendor with crawling expertise.

    Up-time - A vendor dedicated to crawling has clusters running on several machines 24 by 7. This is needed to ensure that their platform is continuously feeding data to all its customers. A failure might occur with a scraping tool when it has not servers available to perform the crawls.
    Scalability - Most of these vendors design their platform to scale with as many customers and sources as possible. As long as such design decisions are incorporated, scale is not an issue and any kind of requirements can be dealt with. Most of the tools get bogged down when scale increases. We have had clients who tried running a scraping tool for a complete day to extract data from a huge site and their laptops died.
    Monitoring - Monitoring is rarely accompanied with any DIY solution. Imagine if you use a tool to extract data from a site every week, and that site changes structure almost every month. Such issues are taken care of with a hosted solution because their platforms have alert mechanisms in place.
    Fail-over and Support - Support is largely provided by vendors if anything goes wrong with the crawl jobs or if data hasn't arrived on time. Basically, life is too easy there. When it's a tool you're using, you're at the mercy of the support center.


From clients- To add some reality to this concept, here are few verbatim queries we have received in the past.

" Is it possible to harvest content according to our specifications rather than crawling the domain by setting a depth because already we are using X and we are finding very difficult to get the entire core content from a page and also the depth of the crawling obstacles us by not getting content for all subjects?" - X is a Platform as a Service where you can write plugins to set up your crawlers. i.e. more than just a software

"We are currently using Y for crawling and would be interested to understand the advantages you can provide. Is there any way you could frame a work flow and harvest content according to our needs because using Y has only been helpful to a limit." - Y is a desktop software for crawling web pages.

Irrespective of one-time or recurring requirements, large-scale crawls always require monitoring and support, whereas recurring requirements call for continuous monitoring, be it small-scale or large-scale. You can take a shot at using a scraping tool if cost of interacting with a vendor for eliciting your small requirements are higher than you trying out a scraping tool. The essence is, if crawl is not your forte, then its best to be with a vendor because crawling is a painful workflow in itself. For more details on how Data as a Service helps, read on here- http://blog.promptcloud.com/2013/04/data-as-a-service-for-market-research.html.

Source: http://blog.promptcloud.com/2013/04/web-scraping-tool-vs-hosted-crawl-solution.html

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on web data scraping, website data scraping, web scraping services, data scraping services, website scraping, eBay product scraping, Forms Data Entry etc.