IMDb Top 250 Visual Checklist

I decided I need to watch more classic movies, so I made this visual list to keep track of the movies I've seen from the IMDb Top 250. The movies are paginated into (graphic-intensive) pages of 50 thumbnails, and the movies I have seen are marked. I'll update the list periodically to track my progress.

1-50 51-100 101-150 151-200 201-250

Top 50 movies seen: 16 (32%)
Top 100 movies seen: 25 (25%)
Top 250 movies seen: 53 (21.2%)
Date generated: Sun Nov 20 12:34:54 2005

I wrote a Perl script to scrape the IMDb top 250 and output the results to a text file. Another script fed the title data in this file into the Amazon API and grabbed the image of the closest matching product. However, many of these images were inappropriate — packaging that differed from the expected poster-look, images with clutter like pictures of DVDs, or even a mismatched product — and a few of the 250 didn't return images at all.

So, for many of the top 250 I had to substitute hand-chosen images because of the incorrectness or inappropriateness of those retrieved by the script. Right now I've only done this for the first 100 — below that, there are still quite a few bad or missing ones in there, which I'll fix later. The tooltips are accurate, though.

A third Perl script then took the top 250 data file, the images retrieved from Amazon, and a list of movies I've seen, resampled all the images to a uniform height, and spat out a load of HTML, producing all the webpages including this one (because, let's face it, making it dynamic would be complete overkill).

The scripts are a horrific mess, so I'm not putting them up here. Any half-decent Perl coder could easily do a far better job in half the time.