josephk wrote on 17. Dec 2008 at 16:02:
Hi Quantum. First, let me just say again how much I appreciate all your work and the many improvements to the database that you've implemented since you took over the site.
BROWSING
One of my favourite ways to browse through the database is by year of production/release. I find this is a more useful way to break things down than the more arbitrary alphabetical listings.
Unfortunately, the database only gives you the option of browsing by decade. With over 2000s movies in the database, I think it might be worth breaking it down further to the level of individual years.
For example, when I want to browse through films made in 2002, I have to click on "2000s" and then get this rather clumsy list:
I think the best option for this would be to add an additional drop-down list for the years, listing all the years in the database - that way you could pick an individual year...
Quote:Two more points:
1. Could you maybe increase the number of hits per page? Right now I think it's listing 25 at a time. Personally, I always prefer to have long lists on a single page, so I wouldn't mind having as many as 100 hits per page. But I guess that affects server response time, so if you think that's too much maybe 50 would be a good number?
At the moment, the 25 hits is hard-coded into the page, but it shouldn't be too hard to change that to a variable. Then it just a question of how you choose how many hits you want. One option would be to have a set of personal preferences where you could define that sort of thing - although you would have to be logged into the site for that to work. I am also looking at a system that would allow you to set a persistent cookie so that you wouldn't have to log in each time you visit the site.
The other option would be to just define the number of hits you want with a cookie - either a persistent one that would last between visits or a temporary one that would need setting each time you visited the site.
Any thoughts?
Quote:2. This might be too complicated, but I thought I'd suggest it anyway. I really like that you've made the AKA titles searchable and that they now show up in the alphabetical listings. This makes it easier to find movies when you only know either the original or the translated title and don't know which is used as the main entry. However, it does clutter up the results unnecessarily when browsing by year, as every foreign film gets listed twice. Would it be possible to only list the main title in chronological listings? That would mean displaying results differently based on whether you're browsing alphabetically or by year, so I can see how that might be too much to ask. I don't know much about coding, but if there's an easy way to get this done, it would be great.
I don't think this should be too difficult - it should be a fairly straightforward bit of logic to change to a slightly different search query which doesn't combine the aka titles as well...
The database is also being moved towards having the original language title as the primary title, with the English translation as the aka. The exception to this is for non-latin script titles (ie Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc films) where the original title is a transliteration and so I don't think it really matters which title is used as the primary title.
Quote:SEARCHING
I think the search function on the database is not loose enough. It seems to always search for the exact string that we enter, regardless of whether there are quotes or not.
This makes it impossible to search for an actor by typing in his full name. Whether I enter "Liam Aiken" or "Aiken, Liam" (without quotes) - no results show up. I have to search for "Aiken" alone, or "Liam" alone. (I think it's because first and last names are entered in separate fields?)
I'm used to it now, so I can work around it. But it seems very counter-intuitive.
It's the same problem for movies. If I search for "The Mist" I will not find the movie I'm looking for. I have to search for "Mist, The", or just "Mist."
I will take another look at the search code so that it's a bit more flexible. In the case of actors names, it would just be a case of splitting up the names you enter and searching for each part of the name against the firstname and surname fields in the database. It's just a case of building up the search query.
In the case of movie names, I think the easiest solution would be to add some code that strips off the indefinite articles (plus any commas) from the search term (ie so that "The Mist", "Mist", and "Mist, The" all get reduced to a search for "Mist"...). It's pretty much the reverse of the function used to display the titles so that the "The", "Le", "La", "A" etc get moved to the start of the title...
Feedback is always welcome, and hopefully it shouldn't take too long to make the changes to the code
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Browsing and searching the database - suggestions (Read 14,230 times)
