Thu, August 4, 2005

Eagle-eyed readers might have already noticed that the onebee navigation options will be changing from "Writing About Online Creative" to "Writing Photos Reviews About" in the near future. I've already detailed many new features for the photos section. The last few days I've been perfecting the reviews.

The idea began with a simple concept: a display of the books I'm currently reading and the movies I currently have out from Netflix. I thought it might spark discussion, or possibly spur me to finish both more quickly.

As usual, my eyes then glazed over with desire as I thought about all that data. My whole Netflix history! Completely databased and sortable! Endless possibilities. The idea grew, incorporating my ratings for each item, plus my review if I decided to write one. So, the reviews section will list everything in the database, with ratings and a link to the review if one exists. When reading the review, the related sidebar will display a few tidbits about the reviewed item, like so:

All of this fell into place surprisingly quickly, but then I realized that my initial approach was deeply flawed: one record for each entry in the Netflix history. For instance, I rented Broadcast News from Netflix in April of 2000, but then I felt like watching it again in July of 2002, so I rented it again. Why have two completely separate records? I had to rip out all the date information and re-code it so that viewings were associated with a review, rather than incorporated into it. Mercifully, that's now complete. It even yielded some snappy ways to display associated items on the edit page; these came in handy for other associated items, like the options in a poll. The admin interface got smarter across the board.

There's an interesting story also, about inspiration and interface design. I've been somewhat unsure about the amount inspiration drawn from kottke.org on certain features, but I've reminded myself that we all draw inspiration from everywhere; the good ideas rise to the top, so if you're doing something in the smartest way it may be similar to someone else who's doing it in the smartest way. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that, but never a blatant rip-off. Anyway, I'm thinking about these issues, and then comes this post from Kottke: My God, it's full of stars..., which details his decision to switch his movie reviews from scores of 1-100 to ratings of 1-5 stars. Aha! So here's an example of him changing to my approach! (Then again, I'm simultaneously changing to a 100 point score, but that's just for the sake of simplicity on the back-end. It will continue to be translated into a 1-5 star rating on the public site.) The point is, the best solution is the best solution, irrespective of who thought of it first.

Other great news: the re-bee is very near completion. Weeks behind schedule, to be sure, but closing fast. I can't put a specific date on it yet, but... very soon.