2025/Düsseldorf/moviesbooks
Movies and books and talks was a discussion session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2025.
Watch: ▶️ 43:57s
Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/moviesbooks
- #moviesbooks
Participants
Tantek Çelik
Schepp
Daniel Pietzsch- ... add names
Background
- Posting about movies and books
- PESOS from Letterboxd
- Gunnar: collection of conferences attended, and talks seen
- similar to movies watched, talks watched
Notes
- We start off with Daniel who presents his personal website where, under the navigation item "media", he's got a page which lists movies that he watches: https://danielpietzsch.com/watched/movies/
The way he does it is that upon every build Daniel calls the Letterboxd API/feed and fetches all the movies that wrote a review for (which is evry movie he watches). He then converts the data to a frontmatter file. That way, when one day letterboxd is no more, he can continue by just adding normal posts. The movie covers are hotlinked from letterboxd. As for the director data, those are not part of the letterboxd API/feed and so he has to scrape those piece separately.
Daniel does the same for books he read, but there he writes a blogpost and adds the book ISBN so that he can hotlink the cover. from Open Library (archive.org).
This is how the book cover links are constructed: 
(fails if they don't have the cover image) redirects to a %KEY%-L.jpg
http://openlibrary.org/isbn/%ISBN%
ISBN %ISBN% -> link to http://openlibrary.org/isbn/%ISBN%
[ISBN %ISBN%] -> embed the book cover hyperlinked to http://openlibrary.org/isbn/%ISBN%
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27180589M.json
https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9781484704219.json
https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9783462040449.json (with cover)
For books there is https://isbndb.com/ and its API https://isbndb.com/isbn-database (but sadly it's not free)
For movies there are the ISAN (https://www.isan.org/) or the IMDb identifiers as possible euqivalents to ISBN: https://chatgpt.com/share/681630ee-3cec-8009-9c47-a7e6f9050b05
E.g. the movie "The Substance" has the ISAN 0000-0002-C704-0000-E-0000-0000-W (as seen here: https://www.swissfilms.ch/de/movie/the-substance/cb8fc9f1738546c4bc8bb5c66a65381c)
Tantek just does traditional links on his page and links to Disney, as they have a very clean link structure.
Schepp mentions the possibility of using Google's "I feel lucky" search: https://www.google.com/search?q=your+search+term&btnI=1 (the btnl parameter triggers it)
As for conference talks, there used to be platforms like Lanyrd and later Colloq.io where you could mark when you attended a conference. From there you could probably get the list of talks, but both services are discontinued.
There is also sched.com - e.g. https://decentralizedwebsummit2018.sched.com/ has individual talks, e.g. https://decentralizedwebsummit2018.sched.com/event/FgCK/lightning-talks-new-discoveries
Schepp did an experiment asking ChatGPT "I was in Freiburg on September 9 & 10, 2024. What confernece talks did I see? Can you list them?" It found that he must have been at Smashing Conf and listed all the talks: https://chatgpt.com/share/68162fa4-868c-8009-b216-42199dfc8464
Since ChatGPT also has an API, you could pass it your tracked location data and have it see what conferences and their talks would match the location and dates and automatically list them on your page.
Would you also include the BarCamp / breakout sessions?
Tantek asks how we could create some kind of conference / conference talk directory. He explains how Lanyrd did allow anyone to add a conference back in the days, and speakers to add themselves to a conference - and that the data was of pretty good quality.
Gunnar, though, points to the fact that Notist tried to do the same but got spammed pretty hard.
Noti.st e.g. https://noti.st/matthiasott, https://noti.st/gunnarbittersmann/presentations
Tantek asks if it would make sense to put up the IndieWebCamp sessions on Notist but Gunnar is pretty sure that our slide-less and collaborative format is not compatible with what they are after.
Should we syndicate IndieWebCamps and their sessions to sched.com?