Over the last few years, I’ve been using IMDB to keep a record of the movies I’ve watched by giving them a rating out of ten using the simple star rating widget at the top of each movie page.

By rating each movie, I have managed to create quite an extensive history of the movies I’ve seen which is publicly available on my personal vote history page.

The problem I’ve had though is accessing that data elsewhere for use on other websites, such as this blog, Twitter or Facebook profile.

Until now, I’ve been using a service called Dapper which can scrape any accessible webpage for data and output that data as a range of different source such as RSS, Atom, JSON or XML.

The RSS output has actually worked quite well but the Dapper service was quite tempramental at keeping up-to-date, sometimes taking a few weeks to update. It wasn’t ideal for a reliable source.

Well, I discovered this morning that IMDB actually offer a dedicated RSS feed directly from their website of this exact data.

If you have been publishing your vote history to a public page, you can see your feed by appending your unique reference to the end of the URL http://feed://rss.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=[your id].

For example, my vote history would be accessible at http://rss.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=5051158.

Unfortunately, the date saved doesn’t seem to be output as the timestamp for each RSS item but I’m sure a few pokes at the IMDB development team could sort that out.

No doubt there are other personalised RSS feeds available from IMDB such as your movie reviews and favourites. If I find any, I’ll add them to this post.

Maybe now, I can tap into the data and start building some useful widgets out of it.

Update: it seems there is already a Facebook app which taps in to your vote history called My Movies.

Sometimes, you want to use an RSS feed as a data source. This may be for publishing on your website or for mashing up data with another service.

Recently, I’ve been building a corporate intranet with the functionality to embed RSS feeds within the content. It’s a great way of generating fresh content in a controlled environment with minimum effort. Unfortunately, there are quite a few RSS feeds which include embedded links for sharing the item via services like ShareThis or Feedburner’s FeedFlare. One such example was the Post Online RSS Feed.

This seemed like an ideal job for Yahoo’s Pipes to tidy up. Here is the process I went through to create the sanitized version:

1. Create a Pipe on Yahoo Pipes (you may need to sign in with a Yahoo! account).
2. Drag Fetch Feed from Source on to the canvas.
3. Enter the URL of your feed.
4. Drag Regex from Operators on to the canvas.
5. Select the item to sanitize, e.g. item.description.
6. In the replace text box, enter <(.|\n)*?>.
7. Leave the with text box empty.
8. Check the g checkbox.
9. Drag a connection from the bottom of Fetch Feed to the top of Regex.
10. Drag a connection from the bottom of Regex to the top of Pipe Output.
11. To test your Pipe, highlight the Pipe Output box and check the results in Debugger panel at the base of the browser.
12. If all has gone to plan, you can Save your new Pipe, give it an appropriate name and start using your new clean feed.

Hopefully, you’ll find this useful. If you do, leave a comment below. Equally, if you encounter any issues with the process, share the problem and how you may have fixed it.