I’m slowly getting all my sidebar item generation scripts converted over to plugins, and sharing them on the offchance there’s any interest. The ‘netflix’ one is ready for the first release.
Unlike the other plugins I’ve released, I haven’t tried hard this time to stick to core Perl modules: it requires Storable (with working lock_retrieve and lock_store), LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Cookies. These could all be worked around, but between what I expect is the relatively low interest in this plugin and the difficulty of doing so, I’ve decided not to for now; if you’re seriously interested in using this, but can’t because of the requirements, please let me know.
Storable is required because I don’t think anybody would want to use this without caching. Looking up the queue information isn’t usually terribly slow, but it is slow enough you don’t want to do it more often than you have to.
LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Cookies are used because Netflix uses a cookie-based login system, and I don’t know of any reasonable way to make ‘lynx’ or ‘wget’ work with it (’curl’ can, with some roundaboutness; that’s what I used to use for this).
Installation
- Verify you have the necessary modules installed; install them if not.
- download and unzip the plugin.
- Copy the plugin to your plugins directory
- Configure the $ShoppingID variable; it won’t do anything until you do. You’ll need to get the correct value from your browser’s cookie cache.
- Add $netflix::have and/or $netflix::queue to one of your flavour files
- Try it out — load your blog in your browser.
- If everything is working, set $debug_level to 1; if not, check your error log to make sure the plugin is being loaded, and see if it’s logging any errors from the Netflix site
- Drop me a note letting me you’re using it and how things are working for you.
- Enjoy!
Things still to do, maybe:
- Go through the login process, so configuration could be an email address/password pair rather than the ShopperID.
- Figure out how to do the transfer with something more commonly available than LWP.