Use del.icio.us to help manage your movie rentals

Posted on October 21, 2005 at 01:53 AM

Since this blog is without the modern conveniences of on-demand cable movies, digital video recorders, or netflix, we still find ourselves trudging to the brick and mortar stores to rent movies. Though every time I find myself within the friendly confines of blockbuster, I've noticed that I seem to suffer from temporary movie rental memory loss. It happens to me all the time. I walk in with the intent to rent something good, and boom it hits me. Before I know it I find myself in a zombie mind trance doing the new movie release shuffle. You know what I'm talking about, you start at the beginning of the new release wall and shuffle through all the movies alphabetically until you find something you're willing to watch. Egads. And heaven forbid should you even try to enter the center of the store, which is what I like to call the pit of despair, where former new releases go to die. It's near impossible to find a movie there.

So how do you stop this madness?

If you have a del.icio.us account (or an account with various other social bookmarking sites) what you can do is create a tag called toRent, and every time you hear about a movie you want to watch (whether at home or at work) you just add that movie to your del.icio.us.

What I like to do is use the IMDB bookmarklet, which helps me find a link to the movie in the Internet Movie Database. Once I've found the link to that movie, I post it to my del.icio.us account under the tag toRent.

Accessing your toRent list in del.icio.us can be done in a couple of ways. If you're lucky to have a web enabled mobile device, just pull up your del.icio.us account the next time you're in the movie rental store. If you are without such a device, you can print out your movie rental list and keep it in your car, purse, wallet, or place it on your refrigerator as a reminder.

Once you've seen a movie on your del.icio.us rental list you can either delete the item or create a new tag called rented and move the link there. This will help you keep track of what you've seen.

I've noticed that there are a lot of classic movies in which I either haven't seen or have only seen in small parts on T.V. so I've populated my del.icio.us toRent list with a few of those movies. Also, if you tend to miss a lot of movies when they're in the theater, you can post those movies to your del.icio.us list when they hit the box office so you will remember to rent it when it comes out in DVD.

Someday soon we hope to enter the 21st century and at least start using a service like netflix. Recent events have found this blog being consumed with watching season three of 24 so I imagine our netflix days are fast approaching, being that we still haven't seen any episodes of season four.

This will be a welcomed change since I've found that making midnight runs to blockbuster, in order to rent the next disk in the series immediately after you've just finished watching four hours of the previous disk, tends to be somewhat embarrassing.

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