Letterboxd Diary API

A simple API to fetch the most recent diary entry from a Letterboxd user's diary page.

This API scrapes the Letterboxd diary page for user "pinjasaur" and returns the most recent film entry in a clean JSON format. Perfect for displaying your latest watched movie on a personal website or blog.

GET /

Returns the most recent diary entry as JSON.

GET /test

Returns a test page that displays the latest movie in a nice UI.

{
  "title": "Long Story Short",
  "year": 2021,
  "rating": 3,
  "watchDate": "2026-01-15",
  "filmUrl": "https://letterboxd.com/pinjasaur/film/long-story-short-2021/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-01-16T15:44:06.852Z"
}

• title: Film title (string | null)
• year: Release year (number | null)
• rating: Star rating from 0.5 to 5 stars (number | null)
• watchDate: Date watched in YYYY-MM-DD format (string | null)
• filmUrl: Link to the film's Letterboxd page (string | null)
• scrapedAt: ISO timestamp of when the data was scraped (string)

fetch('https://your-val-town-url.web.val.run/')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    console.log(`Latest watched: ${data.title} (${data.year})`);
    console.log(`Rating: ${data.rating}/5 stars`);
  });

<div id="latest-movie"></div>

<script>
async function loadLatestMovie() {
  try {
    const response = await fetch('https://your-val-town-url.web.val.run/');
    const movie = await response.json();
    
    document.getElementById('latest-movie').innerHTML = `
      <div class="movie-card">
        <div style="width:150px;height:225px;background:#2c3440;display:flex;align-items:center;justify-content:center;color:#9ab;font-size:24px;">🎬</div>
        <h3>${movie.title} (${movie.year})</h3>
        <p>Rating: ${'★'.repeat(movie.rating || 0)}${'☆'.repeat(5-(movie.rating || 0))}</p>
        <p>Watched: ${movie.watchDate}</p>
        <a href="${movie.filmUrl}" target="_blank">View on Letterboxd</a>
      </div>
    `;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Failed to load latest movie:', error);
  }
}

loadLatestMovie();
</script>

The API includes caching headers:

• Cache-Control: public, max-age=300 (5 minutes)
• CORS: Enabled for all origins

The API returns appropriate HTTP status codes:

• 200: Success
• 404: No diary entries found
• 500: Server error (network issues, parsing errors, etc.)

Error responses include a descriptive message:

{
  "error": "No diary entries found",
  "message": "The diary appears to be empty or the page structure has changed."
}

• Built with TypeScript on Val Town
• Scrapes HTML from https://letterboxd.com/pinjasaur/diary/
• Uses regex patterns to extract structured data
• Handles various edge cases and fallbacks

• Only works for public Letterboxd profiles
• Currently hardcoded to user "pinjasaur"
• Dependent on Letterboxd's HTML structure (may break if they change their layout)
• Rate limited by Letterboxd's servers
• No authentication or private diary support
• Poster images are not available due to dynamic loading on Letterboxd

Potential improvements could include:

• Support for multiple users via query parameters
• Pagination to get multiple recent entries
• Additional metadata extraction (genres, director, etc.)
• Webhook support for real-time updates
• Better error handling and retry logic