Wed, April 18, 2007

Every time a new Netflix DVD arrives in the mail, I enter it into onebee's database. (Most times, I also squeal and do a little dance.) This allows the disc to show up on the About page until after I watch it, when it will move to the Reviews page. As part of this process, I need to track down the IMDb, Metacritic, Amazon, and Netflix links for that movie – a process that's pretty swiftly automated at this point.

Last night, as I was entering Ryan's Daughter (a film I have no recollection of adding to my Queue, by the way – the surprise is part of the fun!), I noticed that Netflix's URL structure has changed.

Previously, the link for a movie's page looked something like this:
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=554631

Now, they look more like this:
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Gorillas_in_the_Mist/554631

This kind of thing is generally done in an effort to make URLs more "Google-friendly" – presumably because if you see the URL in a page of search results, you have a better idea of what you'll get when you click it. I switched onebee's URLs to a similar scheme during the re-bee for about the same reason.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish this, and in a "legacy" situation like Netflix's, my hunch was that they used re-writing rules to extract just the movie ID (554631) and pass it to the old MovieDisplay page. I.e., the Gorillas_in_the_Mist part is just there for show. Sure enough, I was right. Which is fun, because it means links like this will also work just fine:
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Gorillas_in_the_Diet_Sierra_Mist/554631

So... that's the kind of thing I spend my time thinking about.