Daily ID file exports

I just wanted to take a quick moment to mention that I started publishing some daily ID file exports. You can read the full documentation about what and how these work here.

Anyone working with our API knows that even though our IDs are assigned in a contiguous fashion, there’s also a lot of deletions which means lots of gaps. The only way to know what ids are valid is to run through the entire namespace starting at 1 and keeping track of the 404’s you get. This wasn’t such a big deal when we had 100,000 movies but now I’m forcing you to waste a lot of time (and using up your rate limits) hitting nothing but dead ids. Hardly ideal. These files solve this problem in a nice and clean fashion and allow you to make your own decision on when to pull updates in order to keep your local data in sync.

There’s one other handy use for these files which is popularity. Our popularity data is included so if you have typically only been running updates to grab the daily popularity value, I suspect using these files will be a much cleaner and faster operation.

Check out the documentation for the nerdy details.