It is a bit rushed, but I managed to get the schedule to export to an iCalendar file in an useful way.
I decided to go with an local calendar application for now instead of adding it to my online calendar. I decided to go with KOrganizer after trying Evolution. Not only was the import feature a lot simpler, it can continue to use that iCalendar file and watch it for updates, so whenever I update it with my script it is automatically added in the application. Neat.
So instead of creating a JSON file to save the schedules, I’m using the iCalendar file and updating that. I don’t yet have a way to delete a show from it, but it will update an existing show instead of creating an duplicate. I imagine that I will continue to update the estimated times several times over the season, so that is rather important that it works.
The amount of episodes in a series is grabbed from the offline database I already have in place. But how well all of this is going to work will first be apparent in a few weeks as the next season starts next week, and it will probably require some tweaking. The start of the last season was a bit unusual and the first episodes was quite off, so I’m not confident I can use last seasons data to dial in the algorithm.
Final thoughts
So this marks the end of the devember event. It has been great. Due to work I haven’t really worked a lot on personal projects and I really enjoyed getting back into it. Pulling all kind of random Python libraries and getting something working very fast has also been fun, that is not something I’m used to from C++ development. My new year resolution has now officially become to work more on personal projects this year.
For the actual project, I managed to get around all the features I wanted to get working. The grouping of torrents works quite well, and getting it synced with AniList and my current progress as been very nice. Including images from the show has really been a game changer. Lots of the random off-season releases that I would otherwise has missed, like old shows from the 90’ties, became noticeable and has let me discover shows I otherwise would have not.
There are a lot of rough corners but it hasn’t really been bothering me. I have been using it almost exclusively to browse the site, so I can only call it an success. I expect to work a lot less on it to focus on other things, but I will probably keep improving it slowly as I will definitely continue using it.
The schedule detection appears to work, but how useful it is in practice will have to wait. If it is not more reliable than to use the official airing times which I think I can grab from AniList, then there is no point. But I think it will and it has been quite interesting never the less.
