Written by Richard. Published on Mar 26th 2011, 10:01. [ general ]
I'm now including the "Reception" or "Critical Reception" parts of the Wikipedia data at the head of the Reviews tab within each film, so even if no user has written a What Film review of a title, you can still see what the critics thought about the movie. This is often very handy in deciding whether or not you should see it too.
I also cleaned up our data a little by adding support for Wikipedia redirect pages, which should remove a lot of the duplicate films we have when they change the URL for one of them. I can now properly handle that and merge them together.
I also have more Twitter integration on the horizon, as well as more complete actor and actress pages, but I'll talk about them when they go live.
Written by Richard. Published on Mar 12th 2011, 02:15. [ general ]
At last, I've completed our Twitter integration. This means that you can now login with your Twitter account and immediately start building your list of seen films without giving us any information whatsoever. Honestly, I don't really want your email address (and I'll start a mailing list if I ever do, where you'll explicitly be signing up to receive stuff).
The other thing Twitter integration gives you is the ability to tweet your viewings as you enter them, sharing them with all your followers. I also added a nice new user review overview page for those tweets to link to (with a bit.ly short link) which shows all your reviews for that film (rating, six word, full).
Finally, I also simplified the logging process for a viewing. You can now enter non-full dates, such as a year, or a year and month, in case you can't remember when you saw something (but know at least that you saw Star Wars sometime in '77). I'm also now asking you to rate the film at that time, as that seems like the most important metric for your viewing taste.
Of course there's still more I want to do, and an iPhone optimised display is probably first on the list (so you can log your viewings on your way home from the cinema). In the meantime, start building those lists.
Written by Richard. Published on Feb 5th 2011, 11:00. [ general ]
It's been a while since I posted an update here, so I thought I'd take a moment and let you all know what's been going on since the last post.
I added some Facebook integration a few months back, with the ability to Like any film on the site, which I think works really well. I'm also looking at letting you signup and login to the site with your Facebook or Twitter account, but I'm not quite there yet.
The latest changes I made have just been designed to simplify things a little, and remove some functionality (like Friends and Messages) that I think in hindsight are not required. Going forward, I may remove more things as I attempt to really target exactly why we're here. Hopefully you find the new homepage, header layout and slightly more muted colours to your liking.
Some other positive news is that our traffic figures post-Christmas have been excellent, with a more than 500% increase in page views. This is mostly down to Google deciding at last that we're worth including in their index, and is a great way to start the new year. Hopefully that will grow as I start to include more ways to share the films you love.
Written by Richard. Published on Sep 29th 2010, 19:45. [ general ]
I've been live now for three days, and I've just made the first major feature update. Videos. All our film pages now have a videos tab at the top, under which you'll find trailers for the film taken from YouTube. Hopefully this helps you decide even more whether a film is something you'd like to see.
I've made lots of of other smaller updates over the past couple of days as people have started to use the site, including fixing a whole bunch of bugs that cropped up. If you've spotted any errors or come across any crazyness, then hopefully most of them have now been squashed.
Lots more ideas still floating around, so much more to come.
Written by Richard. Published on Sep 24th 2010, 23:18. [ general ]
A quick domain registration lookup will see that the domain name was registered back in 2001. And it's been through a few different iterations since then, as the Internet Wayback machine will probably attest. But here we are at last, with a site much closer to the original vision.
Better late than never.
There are plenty of other movie sites out there, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Flixster, but none ever seemed to offer what I wanted. Nine years ago, that was definitely the case, but when it's taken this long to bring the idea to life (although technically development on this iteration started in July this year) why bother now? I asked myself that a lot before starting.
Part of it is just control freakery. Why use somebody elses film website when you can use your own? Part of it is certainly for the fun of it. It's been a good ride building this over the last few months. But mostly it's just about getting the chance to build a community. It's always been my favourite part of the Internet experience. And while I don't have the budget, the marketing, the backing, venture capital or the special valley friends that seem to be necessary to get anything off the ground these days, perhaps we can get a couple of hundred people here that actually want to make something of it. Who actually want to be involved.
And that's the best difference I can offer. I'll listen, I'll change, I'll iterate, I'll improve. With a development cycle faster than the others can manage, because I don't have a million users, 10,000 servers, and a team to deal with. There's just me, and you, and this website between us.
Let's see what happens.
PS. Recommendations. Yes. I know. They'll come, but you have to start somewhere.
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