Netflix bookmarklets   ...   elsewhere on the web , netflix
sun 2005-jan-09 14:33:38 pst   ...   permalink

I was thinking that it would be really nice to be able to go from an IMDb movie page to the corresponding Netflix movie page. And then I realized that it probably wouldn't be too hard to make a bookmarklet to do it.

(For those who haven't seen the term before, a "bookmarklet" is a snippet of javascript that you can store as a bookmark in your browser's toolbar, and then in some particular context, clicking it will perform some useful action.)

Anyway, I haven't personally done much with javascript, and I'd never made a bookmarklet, but then it occurred to me that probably someone's already made exactly the one I want. A quick search for [netflix imdb bookmarklet] turned up almost exactly what I wanted. The one described there takes the title of the current page -- which on a Netflix movie page is of the form "Netflix: Movie Title" -- and throws out the first nine characters to get just the title, then does a search on IMDb for that title.

Now, on IMDb, the page title of the main page for a movie is of the form "Movie Title (YEAR)", so my bookmarklet takes that and throws out the last seven characters to get just the title, then does a search on Netflix for that. (Unfortunately another click is always required since even when there's only one clear match, the Netflix search doesn't take you straight there, it gives you a results page. But that's not a big deal.)

So here's the imdb to netflix bookmarklet -- but you don't want to click that link now, you want to pop up the menu to select "copy link location" or whatever, then create a bookmark and paste the location. (The above linked site has instructions for creating the bookmark in Safari.) Alternately, depending on your browser, you can just drag the link to your toolbar.

And here's the other direction (may as well include it here in case the above link to the site where I got it ever breaks): netflix to imdb bookmarklet.

I currently have them next to each other in my toolbar, like this:

imdb<- ->netflix

w00t!

wed 2005-jul-27 07:54:34 pdt
posted by Michael

Just wanted to thank you for posting these awesome tools.

thu 2007-feb-01 04:45:44 pst
posted by nate

thanks for these tools.. and easy instrction

sun 2007-sep-09 20:13:40 pdt
posted by neilfred

I've updated the bookmarklets to be a little more robust -- instead of stripping off a fixed number of characters at the beginning or end, it now looks for a space character and strips up to there.

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