Tiny Experiment
Movie Night
A small GitHub Pages site powered by a Google Sheet and Apps Script, built to make picking a movie slightly less annoying.
I made Movie Night as a tiny test for using a Google Spreadsheet and Apps Script as the "database" for a live static site.
The problem, I suspect, is very relateable. My wife and I regularly spend WAY too long deciding what movie to watch. Now, when one of us notices something interesting, I paste the Rotten Tomatoes link into a spreadsheet. Apps Script fetches the movie data, the Google Sheet publishes it as CSV, and a GitHub Pages site reads that data into a searchable list.
As I'm writing this I'm realizing we've seen a bunch of these movies... time to update the database. C'mon man, you're better than this.
The site itself is deliberately simple. It renders mobile-friendly movie cards with posters, year, genre, runtime, critics and audience scores, synopsis text, Rotten Tomatoes links, trailer links, and a few filters. The interesting part was not building a movie app, really. It was testing whether a spreadsheet could be a comfortable lightweight CMS for a tiny personal site.
So far, it works nicely for this scale. The sheet is easy to update, Apps Script does the boring data cleanup, and the public site stays static enough to host on GitHub Pages.
AI Disclosure
I used AI to help create this little app. While I am fully capable of building something like this myself, the point here was to stand up a useful solution quickly. Gotta say, it stumbled a little here and there but ChatGPT ultimately did a pretty solid job.
The repo is here if you want to poke around: github.com/baconandgames/movie-night.