Introducing Chronoplex

I made a thing that lets you generate chronological playlists in Plex.

TL;DR: I made a fun tool to generate Plex playlists. Check out Chronoplex Chronolists.

A while back I built CMCUCP (Complete Marvel Cinematic Universe Chronological Playlist), a python script that would connect to your Plex server and create a playlist of any MCU content you owned, in chronological order. It was mostly because creating it manually in Plex was a nightmare, but it was also a fun little project.

I started to wonder if it was possible to do the same thing from a web page, so people didn't have to run a python script (or the docker container I added) to get their own version of the playlist. The plan was to throw something together as a proof of concept and write it up here, as part of my new goals for 2021.

That was in November. It's now February, and I've had to force myself to stop adding things and refactoring. I think that's the best kind of side project.

I'll be writing some of these up in more detail, but here's an overview of what I learned building it.

  • Gatsby's node APIs are incredibly powerful
  • Plex's API is a black box of hell
  • The relays that Plex provides are pretty cool
  • Functional React components with hooks are so good
  • If I'm enjoying a side project I need to force myself to stop
  • Netlify is great for quickly throwing things online

Update: I've since renamed this project to Chronolists to avoid any confusion over the Plex name. Article content has been updated to reflect this, but I've kept the title as-is for posterity (and not at all because I don't want to add a redirect).