Sesamstraat Random Episode Picker
Bob Rubbens


For all those busy parents; the one thing nobody asked for, but which
everyone needed, is finally here!

I made a Sesamstraat episode randomizer. The NPO Start website was just
getting too janky on our slow TV laptop. When you visit
https://bobrubbens.nl/project/sesamstraat, your browser is redirected to
a random Sesamstraat episode on NPO Start.

I expect this will shave many parents hours off their daily childcare
routine, as it has done for me. Enjoy!

Technical details

I braincoded a script that scrapes episode URLs off Sesamstraat’s NPO
Start pages. As the NPO Start webpage for Sesamstraat contains a json
object containing exactly this information, this just requires some
string/HTML/JSON mangling and a few HTTP GET requests. The episode URLs
are then written to a json file in my website repo, which turns it into
a redirecting webpage whenever my website is deployed.

Child can do the laundry, as we say in Dutch!

The only downside is that I need to run the scraping script manually if
the NPO Start website changes. If you’ve been getting redirected into
404’s, let me know and I’ll rerun the scraper.