Introduction and motivation

About a year ago, I stumbled upon this blogpost. I really liked the idea and how the webpage described there works and looks - just a minimalistic table with all the data needed on one screen, without ads and unnecessary clicking - perfection. The bonus feature of being able to scroll to the bottom and discover single screenings of older movies in various cinemas is a nice cherry on top. I immediately wanted to try this website out and search for some screenings near me, but since I live in Poland, the website would not work for me. I quickly searched the web for similar websites for Polish cinemas, and I found some with aggregated screenings from different cinemas, but nothing with a similar layout and ability to see and compare all the screenings at once. I've also noticed that in some search engines there are some screening hours when searching for particular phrase, but So the decision was simple - I need to build the page myself!

Technological stack

I was considering different approaches to creating the website, but since the data about screenings doesn't change very frequently, I decided to create it as a static website with a background script running every night, fetching data about screenings from multiple cinemas. I was familiar with hosting static webpages on GitLab pages, so that's what I chose. The script for fetching the data is hosted on my cloud VPS, and a cron job is configured to rerun it every night.

Development process

at first, problems, need for monitoring

Monitoring

Analytics

why not google analytics

The long run

page works well, suprisingly few problem for about a year problems:

  • inconsistent titles, but in not so many movies
  • mobile UI
  • small cinemas

Result

So after not so long in real development time (about two weeks), and almost a year of testing the website by myself and fixing occasional failures, I can present wszystkiekina.pl!