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Comment by maxwelldone | Hacker News Reader

Don't know if this qualifies as cool but I built a single purpose site to list IMDb ratings of all episodes of a TV show in a grid, which runs on GitHub Pages. It doesn't use any external APIs.

https://theshowgrid.com

I built it mainly for personal use. I know IMDb ratings aren't perfect but it's a decent measure of mass opinion.

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I like the simplicity, nicely done. On the homepage there is a giant empty spot on the right, not sure if that was intentional or something isn't loading. If there's nothing there now, maybe a screenshot of a sample show would be a nice way to introduce it.

Thanks mate. You're right, on big screens (< 5% of users) the empty spot is a bit of a concern. I'll try to add a gif of a demo. Honestly, this was a build, automate and forget type of weekend project. So I forced myself to stop adding features but can certainly find some time to improve it a bit.

I saw the network tab while searching, and no API calls were made for searching. If possible can you elaborate on how you made the search like this possible?

Also loved the minimalist design and also how you can see your recently searched terms at the bottom.

imdb.com/interfaces/ maybe.

My network tab shows that a shows.json file gets downloaded upon site load so it should be able to search within memory.

Thanks mate. I wanted to build a no nonsense site and think I've achieved my goals for the time allotted for a weekend project.

The architecture is dead simple. Multiple times a week IMDb publishes bare bones datasets. I've a bash script to download them, format and load into MySQL from which I export two types of json files:

1) a file with all the TV shows names, id, ratings etc (shows.json) - this is what's used for search. It weighs 2MB compressed and I could certainly optimize but considering the low traffic I've stashed it for later time.

2) A file for every tv show with all the ratings and votes for its episodes. Based on your search, the specific file will be fetched to display ratings. This one file per show could also be optimized but looks premature at this stage.

You can see them here: https://github.com/dvnlgls/theshowgrid/tree/gh-pages/assets

Strictly speaking, a database is also not necessary but it serves 2 purposes: 1) I could query easily to satisfy some curious show related questions. 2) The datasets include a ton of stale data (like shows w/o episodes and vice versa), so I find it easier to cleanup through SQL.

Super-cool, thank you! How else could I so quickly learn which e.g. South Park episodes to watch?!

Thank you. That's precisely why I built this. Yesterday I wanted to catch up on Season 3 of Grand Tour and guess which site I went to see what to watch!

awesome work! makes it easier to figure out what to watch first in a new series, and even if it's worth watching.

I also appreciate the snapiness due to not using external APIs.

Thanks for the kind words. The use case you mentioned is the primary motivator for the site. That's especially useful for shows you want to revisit or new ones where sequential viewing isn't necessary (like Top Gear etc.)

wow, this site is great. Thank you. Bookmarked! (simpsons season 2-9 really was the best, but until season 15 it was still "ok i guess")

Thanks mate! Interestingly,The Simpsons was the show that sort of inspired me to build this site. I saw an image on reddit showing all the Simpsons episode ratings and thought it would be a fun idea to build a website based on the concept.

Clever. Nice work.

Would you also add the average score per season ?

Thanks. That shouldn't be difficult to implement. Added to the todo.

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