I’ve built something, just in time for me to crowbar it awkwardly into conversations at OKCon.
Matthew Somerville is well known for his accessible takes on rubbish websites: most useful is Traintimes, a layer on top of one of the equally poor commercial British rail sites; most notorious is Accessible Odeon, a fixing of the Odeon Cinema’s website that put their own substandard development to shame so much that in 2004 they had Matthew’s version taken down with legal threats. Remember: just because you’re successful doesn’t mean you’re not stupid.
Recently, Matthew gave an OGN talk on split tickets. These are train journeys which one cross-country train company sells at exhorbitant rates, whereas the components of the journey can be bought separately from the local companies for considerably less. This is what we infer; the rail websites try to keep it all quiet, in the hope that you might lose interest and stump up. The whole headshakeworthy situation is either a stinging indictment of the stupidity of privatizing a rail network and making passengers jump through ridiculous hoops to glean even the tiniest advantage, or a perfect demonstration of how the choice-enriched consumer can leverage capitalism in action: take your pick.
To come to the point: Matthew has set up a wiki where people have been adding the split tickets they’ve worked out in an ad-hoc fashion. Last Sunday I added K’s astonishing 47% saving for Oxford–Cardiff to the end of it, and there’s been little activity since. The page hasn’t got fantastic Google juice—”split tickets” means too many other things—and is just non-dynamic HTML, editable through the wiki but otherwise searchable only by eye.
At the moment, of course, there’s no reason for Matthew to expend any more effort on such a small and barely popular data set. But last Sunday I had a sudden instinctive jolt, to the effect that: more people would be likely to take advantage of split tickets if there was an easier way of looking up other people’s discoveries (my colleagues were recently trying to find split tickets and the wiki page was harder to use than Traintimes, for that very purpose).
With this in mind, here’s my take on accessificating the wiki page: Spliticket. It accesses a cached version of the page, and then using Python’s HTMLParser to hack away at the HTML it returns either a HTML or XML representation of any journey it finds. The idea is that it’s a bit easier to use on your mobile device, and lets you pin down journeys better. I’ve also included an option for searching strictly for the same journey: I’m not sure if split tickets—even returns—always work when the journey is reversed.
Spliticket also supports friendly URLs (inspired by Traintimes itself), so York to Edinburgh in HTML becomes <http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/spliticket/html/york/edinburgh/> and the aforementioned Oxford to Cardiff route in XML becomes: <http://www.jpstacey.info/applications/spliticket/xml/oxford/cardiff/> .
Mostly this was just something to fill idle hours, and also to convince myself of some ideas I’ve had recently about loose coupling, data reuse and open data. Hopefully at the same time (a) Matthew won’t take it as a dig, (b) others might find some casual use for it see it, and (c) a select few might see it as a testament to the ease of freeing information from solid if unsemantic markup. And maybe in six months’ time we’ll all be booking split tickets as a matter of course; by then, of course, Spliticket will probably be gratefully obsolete, replaced by the fully-fledged application that poor, embittered rail passengers deserve. I’m sure Matthew will build it if so.
