Qup.tv

One Month of Qup!

Today Qup celebrates its first month of existence, and it’s been a wild ride! In our first month we have:

• Tracked more than 300 new titles released to Netflix
• Had more than 800 users sign up to use Qup
• Delivered more than 14,000 emails to users
• Added more than 650 titles to users’ Netflix queues
• Received press coverage in GigaOM, SlashGear and more
• Added features including RSS Feeds and Genre Filters

I never expected that Qup would become the success that it has and I’m just happy to sit back and enjoy the ride. Keep tuning in and queueing up, Qup is here to stay!

New Feature: RSS Feeds!

Good news, everyone! We just added RSS Feed support to Qup! But Michael, I hear you asking, doesn’t Netflix already have a new release RSS feed? They sure do, but not like this. The Qup feed features:

• The same one-click queue and watch functionality as Qup’s emails
• Netflix (and Rotten Tomatoes) ratings for each title
• Respect for your Qup preferences (including genre exclusions and minimum ratings)
• No duplicates! (If you already subscribed to the Netflix feed, you’ll know what I mean)

To get started with your feed just visit your Qup account profile and click the big “Feed” link in the top right corner (or click on the standard feed button in your browser’s toolbar). Note that because the feed is personalized for each user you shouldn’t share the feed URL with anyone you wouldn want to be able to add movies to your queue. Enjoy!

Under the Covers: Qup.tv’s Technology Stack

In case you were curious how Qup.tv was built, here’s a quick rundown of the technology behind it:

• Sinatra is the main application layer and serves up all of the web content.
• MongoDB stores user and title information. MongoMapper is the ODM that connects it to Ruby.
• Redis stores usage statistics and worker queue info.
• Sidekiq handles fast, concurrent worker processing.
• Pony delivers the mail using SendGrid.
• Nokogiri parses the Netflix RSS feed of new releases
• Faraday performs the HTTP fetching of API calls from Netflix and RottenTomatoes.
• OmniAuth handles the Netflix authentication with omniauth-netflix doing the specific heavy lifting.
• Sprockets handles the asset pipeline powering the compilation of Coffeescript, SASS, Compass and Twitter Bootstrap.
• Heroku hosts the service on the best platform around.
• Unicorn provides speed and concurrency on a single Heroku dyno.

It’s amazing both how much can be accomplished in 24 hours and how large the list of tools and libraries can grow in that short of time.

Hacked in the Midwest

Hello! Welcome to the Qup blog. This will simply be a place to post longer-than-tweet form info about Qup.

If you’re new to this party, Qup is a simple way to receive email notifications when new Netflix Instant titles become available. Queue and watch them with one click, and filter based on Netflix and Tomatometer ratings!

Qup was built as an entry for Hack the Midwest and had the honor of winning the top prize at the competition from a field of 27 great teams. If you’re as addicted to Netflix as I am, I think you’re going to like Qup!