google calendar + movies.com = happy ryan
I've always enjoyed watching movies. I'm not the type that will remember every movie ever watched, nor will I analyze the bits out of every movie I see, but I enjoy them while I'm watching. Time flies so fast that movies often come and go in the theater before I have a chance to see them. Sometimes I remember to put them in my Netflix queue (which is over 150 movies long), but often not.
To solve this problem...
Google Calendar has a nifty feature called "Web Content" events. Web Content events allow you to put a small icon on the top of a single day of your calendar. This icon can be linked to a popup div which contains an iframe to an arbitrary url.
movies.com provides RSS feeds of movies currently in theaters and upcoming movies. These finds include pictures from the movies and links to movies.com's site for more information on the movies.
The ROME project provides a Java library for parsing RSS feeds.
In addition to using their API, Google Calendar provides a way to publish these events via an iCalendar feed.
Stitch this, mash this, pound this all together into a small Java application, and you come up with MovieRetriever. This small app retrieves the movies.com RSS feeds, uses the ROME library to parse them, and then writes the content to html files representing each day. An iCalendar file is then generated that points to these html files and a little movie icon for each day when movies are released. Voila -- I should hopefully never forget to go see a movie ever again! (Okay, at least I made a noble effort)
Adding the calendar...
Add this to your 
Oh, and if you're looking for the source of MovieRetriever, I need to clean up the code a bit first :)
Some other folks have done nifty things with web content as well:
- Michael Bolin's Web Content Wizard allows anyone to create web content items on their calendars' without a single line of code!
- Pamela Fox's Newsmakers Of The Day (NOT'D) shows popular news articles on your calendar
- Remember the Milk has to do list integration using Google Calendar and web content (notice those little checkmarks on my calendar?)