Real videos, landscape posters, and the first affiliate postback

Yesterday's catalogue was cosplay. Today it's real. The first Apify scraper fired against a live studio, the processor ingested the dataset, images flowed into Cloudflare R2, and the site suddenly has actual videos with actual posters on them. A chunk of the day was shaking out the parts of the pipeline that only break under real volume, one was that Next.js was resolving a Cloudflare Image Transformation against the wrong zone, so every poster rendered as a tiny 404ed placeholder until we pointed it at the right origin.

Once the imagery was right, a bigger visual change: every video thumbnail flipped from portrait 2:3 (the Letterboxd-inherited default) to landscape 16:9. VR and clip-driven adult content isn't about poster-art aspect ratios, it's about a single still frame of the scene itself, which is always 16:9. Portrait posters made every card look like it was missing something. Landscape is the honest frame. Mobile got a proper responsiveness pass alongside; the old default-browser rendering was usable but not intentional.

Then the money part. Affiliate CTAs gained deep-linking, instead of dropping every click at the studio's homepage, we fuse the affiliate base URL with the video's original path so the visitor lands on the specific scene they came to see. The postback endpoint went in, so when someone converts the event can be attributed back to a specific placement on a specific video. Zero real conversions yet, but the plumbing is ready to catch the first one.