GoodSir (2011)
GoodSir was a site for movie metadata. I designed it to be the go-to source for movie info from all my favorite sites.
Why the name? GoodSir.org seemed like a decent domain after an entire evening of trying to find a domain related to movies that wasn’t squatted.
Data sources
The site was run on AppEngine and pulled data in from multiple sources:
- Movie descriptions: Wikipedia’s API
- Movie images, categories, and search: Freebase (RIP. It was a cool service while it lasted)
- Movie ratings: Netflix, IMDb
- Recommendations: Netflix, IMDb
Lessons Learned
- 3rd party APIs break all the time. Every API you rely on with takes away from your overall reliability. Choose with caution.
- Scraping IMDb was actually more reliable than using Netflix’s API
- AppEngine gets expensive when you need to pull so much data
- Converting between different service’s IDs took a lot of work
Screen Shots
Movie overview:
Categories:
