My Netflix Queue Problem
My Netflix queue has 45 things in it; last year around this time, it had 49.
The queue is a great idea. I can add movies to the queue whenever I read about a movie and decide I want to see it. Often, I'll read about it before it's released on DVD; the queue will remember.
The problem is, simply, that it would take 18 months for me to exhaust the queue. In practice, movies show up in the mail of which I've never heard. Today, it was Tully. What's this? Ebert liked it; maybe that's how it wound up on the list. Beats me.
A better solution would be to make a note about why I'm adding the movie. "Ebert liked it", or "Jennifer Jason Leigh", or "early Altman". I could put the note in Netflix, if they added the feature. Or I could just write it in my Tinderbox daybook.
Does Netflix have an API? It might be handy if we could write a Tinderbox macro that would let you request a movie from Tinderbox.
Connecting to web services is one of the things we've been learning to do better as part of Flint -- the new Tinderbox weblog assistant. Flint is currently in thrill-seeker's release; one user just wrote to say that 'Flint is absolutely brilliant! I didn't actually get much sleep last night, as I was plugging away and experimenting with it 'til the sun came up.'