Results of a little bit of weekend hacking…
http://twitter.com/sydneytraffic
It parses / screen scrapes the Sydney RTA’s traffic reports, does some text substitution in an effort to get the event text under the twitter 140 character message limit and automatically posts the updates. The idea is that one could then subscribe to sydneytraffic on twitter and receive SMS updates of the latest traffic situation.
Strangely, the RTA don’t provide an XML / RSS / Atom feed or anything sensible for these updates, so it was a bit of a challenge to strip out the relevant information from the table heavy HTML. I’m going to continue making improvements and updates to the text substitution and shortening, but it’s basically functional now. Python source to be posted shortly.
Brilliant stuff! Hate to think how much work this took, but it certainly seems to work well at this point. Ill keep checking back here for updates.
11 September 2008 @ 9:02 am
Just stumbled across this… Great work! It’s disappointing (though not surprising) that organisations like the RTA don’t have the initiative to do this themselves. Again, top work!
01 October 2008 @ 8:37 pm