I watch a fair amount of films and TV and I also have a shit memory, so it’s nice to have a list of stuff I’ve watched with (very arbitrary) ratings. Not to obsessively track what I watch, I don’t care about that, but for those (frequent) times when I go “What was that good film we watched the other day?” or when people ask for recommendations.
I used a website called Trakt for this and it worked well enough. All I really wanted was a list of stuff I’d watched ordered by date and by rating (two lists, like) and it did that fine.
Recently, they seemed to enter the “we’ve got a load of users, let’s paywall everything in the guise of a ‘UI redesign’” phase of their development cycle.
I could just move to whatever web service people are moving to instead, but the same thing would happen, it would be temporary. Or maybe Trakt will relent in the face of everyone hating the ‘redesign’, but the same applies.
When we use these things we’re at the whim of what some techbro bellend thinks will be profitable. It’s always temporary, the rug will always be pulled.
It’s not even like Trakt was doing anything clever, for my use at least, just a list of films/shows with dates and ratings. So I decided to replace it with a bash script (yeah, I know, I’ll get off Gitlab soon).
I exported my ‘data’ from Trakt, which was all in horrible json. I did some jq magic (i.e. guesswork) and got the stuff I cared about into a single tab-separated file.
Now I can just go rate "White Men Can't Jump" 1992 10 in a terminal and the script takes that, sticks it in the tsv file with today’s date, generates a couple of very basic html pages and uploads them to this server. I also made it so I can just update in case I want to stick stuff in the tsv manually.
I’m not suggesting anyone else use this script, it’s not particularly well written and is tailored very much to my use. But it only took about an hour, works better than Trakt ever did for me and will work forever.
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