Some time ago I wrote a little PHP script to pull my "Recent Activity" RSS feed from Netflix and then try to glean what movies I currently had at home. The "Recent Activity" feed is an xml feed of what movies have been shipped to you and which ones have been received back at Netflix HQ. By cross-referencing which ones have been shipped but not received back I can figure out which ones I currently have. There is a small problem: the feed only contains five items so if you keep one movie at home and receive and send back two movies, the reception of the movie you still have is out of the feed and drops off my list.

Well, that problem still exists. This post isn't about how I fixed that. This post is about how, with the magic of AJAX (via the SAJAX library), I recently updated it with a little functionality to show my entire queue underneath it without reloading the page.

As it stands now I'm pretty sure it will only work in Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorer. I tried it in Konqueror but the absence of the DOMParser to handle navigating the XML feed, it ain't working.

Some of you may or may not have heard about AJAX, and some of you may be wondering what it actually is. It stands for "Asynchronous Javascript And XML." The quick and dirty of it is this: it uses the newer browsers' ability to reconnect to a webserver and pull new data while the page is live in your browser, without reload. The XML is there simply because it's an easy way to pull a rich dataset when you only have the ability to interchange text.

So that's it, look for it over there on the sidebar right underneath my Netflix queue thingy. I know it doesn't seem that amazing, but I thought it was pretty cool for my first foray into the new buzz in the Interweb world. That's how I roll, Web 2.0 style biatch.

If anyone's interested in the code just drop me a line and I'd be happy to scoot it off to ya. I'm not going to promise it's pretty to look at, but it works.