Yahoo! Hacks

View Movie Lists on Your Cell Phone

Next time you go to the video store, take a Yahoo! Movies list with you on your cell phone.

Imagine you find yourself in a video store, searching for the perfect movie among the thousands of choices and drawing a blank. Even though you might have a mental list of several movies you’ve been meaning to see, it always seems those crucial bits of information aren’t available when you need them. If you have a cell phone with web access, Yahoo! Movies and some Perl scripting can get you out of this jam.

This hack takes advantage of the Lists feature at Yahoo! Movies [Hack #41] , which is designed to put movies together into a group. By creating a list of movies you’d like to see, you’ll have the movies in a convenient format for scripting. From there, the hack uses some Perl to convert the Yahoo! Movies list into Wireless Markup Language (WML) that you can view on your phone.

Creating Your List

To get started, you need to turn your mental list of movies you’d like to see into something more tangible. Browse to http://movies.yahoo.com/profiles and click Create New List. If you don’t already have a Yahoo! ID [Hack #3] , you’ll need to create one in order to use the movie list feature. Choose “Movies I Want to See” from the suggestions list or create your own title. Now you’ll have a blank list waiting for some entries.

At the top of the page, you should see a form titled Search Yahoo! Movies. Type in the name of a movie you’d like to see. If you don’t ...