Movieland

The other day, I started idly wondering how much work it would be to collect the data from all my movie blog posts and then, like, do something with it. Something frivolous. On the movie blog I’ve got this thing, which has a kind of stark quality to it, but I’ve been blogging more about movies on this blog… My “series” blog posts usually follow some sort of template, so surely it would be easy enough to write some code to parse those, and then make something fun and useless? Like… more overviews… and pages for directors… and… I dunno? Stuff? That surely wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours of typing, right? Right? Reader, it took more than a couple hours of typing. But now there’s results. The main problem was that the information (director’s name, IMDB code, movie posters, etc) is partially available from many sources, so it’s a matter of smushing it all together. But no matter how much you code (the Emacs Lisp file for the conversion/HTML generation is at 1,500 lines now),…