One of our recent Netflix rentals was The End of Suburbia. I’ve been reading quite a bit on urban planning lately, especially New Urbanism, and somewhere along my journey I found a pointer to this movie. I’ll hopefully write about New Urbanism later, but for this post I want to focus on the movie and my family’s reaction to it.
I was just over on Uneasy Rhetoric who is unfortunately taking an indefinite hiatus from blogging. That’ll be a great loss for Sacramento. But the good news is that I ran across a comment by Margaret and stopped by her site for the first time in way too long. It turns out that Margaret and Chris are Netflix members, so I hopped over to Netflix and see about adding them to my friends list there. I’m not very happy with Netflix’s approach, which seems too spammy to me, so I’d rather not use it. But I did find an invitation to join my Netflix friends list which is a URL that you can email or post (as I’m doing here). So if you’re a Netflix user and a reader, please follow that link and add me (and my family) as one of your friends!
A few days ago my family signed up for Netflix. I had some spare time to play over the Thanksgiving weekend, so I installed and set up MyNetflix2 on my blog. Here’s how I did it. These instructions cover installation of MyNetflix2.0 beta on my web server (running FreeBSD 4.8). YMMV
cd my_wordpress_dir/wp-content/plugins
fetch http://amphichon.com/wp-content/media/mynetflix20b.tar.gz
tar -xzf mynetflix20b.tar.gz
<?php if (function_exists('mynetflix')) { ?>
<h4><?php _e('Recent NetFlix Activity'); ?></h4>
<?php mynetflix('out'); ?>
<?php } ?>
That’s all there is to it. I’m going to see if I can hack up an Options page for this code to make it a true plugin. This would handle the RSS ID string(s) and the $plan settings, and possibly the image layout options. If/when I finish that, I’ll send the changes to herichon for inclusion in the next release.
Well, we finally got around to joining Netflix yesterday, and we’ve already got 60 movies in our queue! Initially we signed up for the 3-at-a-time plan, but we’ll probably change to the cheapest plan once the novelty wears off.
Several of our friends already use Netflix, and they all had good things to say about the service. The only words of caution I received had to do with “throttling” of the movie pipe. This is spelled out in the terms of service, and basically says that if you burn through your queue they reserve the right to take their time sending your next movie. Fair enough, I guess.
Of course, this gives me another feature to hack/play with here on the blog: displaying our Netflix queue and/or recent activity. I was initially thinking of using Jimbo’s mynetflix 1.5 plugin, but he’s been pretty busy lately. It looks like development work has been taken over by Herichon, who recently released mynetflix2. I’ll be fiddling with this plugin and squeezing it into my page somewhere. Of course, this is going to be another customization that needs to be maintained for each theme, sigh.
If you’re a Netflix user reading this blog, feel free to add us (my wife and I) to your friends list. Our Netflix address is
netflix@thisblogsname.net
(In case that’s not clear enough, you’ll need to replace thisblogsname with SonicChicken.) My wife and I also have personal profiles to cover movies that we disagree about, for example I like Dr. Strangelove and she doesn’t. If you want to add us individually use our name instead of “netflix” in the account, e.g. jim@thisblogsname.net.
