I run a local community site, and one of our services is a movies page with showtimes for local theaters, as well as links to the official site, IMDB page, Rotten Tomatoes page, etc. for each movie. However, I'd love to be able to directly display the Rotten Tomatoes score for each movie we list. I've turned up numerous references to scraping that content for things like XBMC and other programs, but not for embedding on a website. I'm not sure if doing so would be against their terms of service, or is even possible, but would like suggestions on how I might go about doing so if it is in fact legal.
2 Answers
Why bother scraping when you can use their official syndication methods? This is much less likely to piss them off, and should be fairly easy for any developer to parse and integrate into your site. This way a change to their HTML doesn't break your site. This is also much less likely to piss off the RT guys, meaning you're less likely to get banned.
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You could create in iMacros for Firefox/Chrome macro that gets the macro, and embed the macro on your website. If the user clicks on the embedded macro, it runs in the browser and gets the data.
Of course, that is not the same as really embedding it. But as it runs on the users' machine it is 100% legal (your IP will never show up in their server logs).
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Would that only work for users who have the iMacros extension installed? Commented Nov 3, 2010 at 20:35
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Yes, but it is a free addon: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863– FrankJKCommented Nov 4, 2010 at 1:20