What’s next…
Just a heads up, we're currently working on Custom Events for Calendar, modifying Calendar a bit to work better. You will be able to add custom events right from the widget or main calendar. Mike is working on Contribute right now, we epect this finished in a few weeks. (It's going to rock!) Next, I plan on adding functionality around the site, re-doing registration, cleaning up dozens of pages and adding new found functionality and going through user suggestions and comments. When this is all completed (Hoping for mid-Septemberish) I will begin on adding a lot of needed functionality to Organize Collection page, adding searching, printing (finally), integration of tags, filtering and getting rid of the pesky Preferences window everyone hates =)
Stay tuned, many new things to come.
-Jason
Tagging tags and the tags that love them
So, if you didn't get the hint from the title, this post is going to focus a bit on tags. It's not that anything is wrong with them or anything has changed with how they work, it's just a quicky/recap/discussion about them.
For those of you who aren't in the know: tags are a useful feature for organizing and maintaining your collection. Think of tags as keywords about the film you're adding them on.
Tags work on both a personal and a global basis. This means that while you may use the keyword "Hero" as a tag on your post, other's may be using that same tag as well. So while you're personally organizing your collection of "Hero" films, others are using that same tag for the same reason.
Now, the global part comes in at the fact that tags can also be looked at globally (the site as a whole) in that tags that are same can be shared amongst users. So if you were looking at the "Hero" tag mentioned earlier, you could see all the users who've added that tag to films as well as what films it has been added to.
This feature is helpful because it helps you discover more using your tag. You can view your "Hero" tag globally and see all the other films users think that tag applies to and potentially find films that you were unaware of.
So, while you may just think your tag helps you personally organize a film, you're actually benefiting the whole community by tagging.
One last point in this soapbox rant that I'd like to bring out is that tagging a film by a genre (which are already listed on the film page) doesn't provide any help to either you or the community as a whole. Oddly enough, our most popular tags or those that are genre tags. The problem is that there's already a way to pull up all films via their genre and not have to tag them (which you can find at http://www.iheartmovies.org/browse/genres/ ).
So hopefully you've learned a bit here at IHM Tags 101 and get to see how your actions can globally impact and contribute to the site as a whole. As usual, feel free to comment on this post with whatever ideas and death threats you have for me.
Edit: I should probably mention that if you'd like to see all of IHM's tags, in a global sense, go here.
Helping IHM help you
There's a few features that sometimes get overlooked on IHM. I don't know if this is because they go unnoticed or people just don't understand what they're there for. They, at this time, only really apply to the film pages.
On every film page, there are many sections, two of which are "Comments" and "Summary". The "comments" section is for people to leave their feelings or thoughts on that film. The "summary" is obviously the plot or summary of what the film is about. Both of these features are pretty regularly used and contributed to by users.
What I'm writing about now doesn't have all that much to do with the contribution of those setions, but your thoughts on what's in those sections. Both features allow rating by users. These rating features are what go unused.
Why these features matter to you:
- Summaries are on every film page as well as littered elsewhere throughout the site and our feeds. While almost every film has a summary right now, the best summary may not always be showing. Sometimes a film has multiple summaries (meaning more than one user added a summary). When a film has more than one summary, we display the highest voted one throughout the site. So, essentially, if summaries aren't getting voted on, the one display is always just the first one submitted, not necessarily the best one. When a summary that was submitted on a later date gets an overall higher vote, it moves to the front page of that film as well as places itself on all parts of the site.
- Comments allow people to see reactions to a film from real people. Uncensored and real opinions from regular joes who've seen the movie at hand. Just as with summaries, we only display the highest rated comments on each film's page. So let's say a film gets many comments, only the highest rated (or earliest submitted in the case of no rating) display on the page. If people were to rate comments they really enjoyed, they move up in the list and will eventually make it to the front page for that film.
While that all comes out in some kind of long tirade about IHM features, it's not meant that way at all. In the end, using these features only helps you as you see the best of the best, so to speak.
So, make the site better for you and get voting!
More widget additions
Two more widgets have been added on tonight to Dashboard. As mentioned before, we're trying to pump a bunch of these out to get users some options as far as their Dashboard.
Widget #1: Movie News. This widget grabs the newest movie related news stories from Digg, Aint It Cool News, Coming Soon and Rotten Tomatoes and allows you to see them all via one widget. Switching between feeds is easily provided via the navigation at the top of the widget.
Widget #2: IHM News. This widget grabs the two newest posts from the IHM blog. There's not much to this widget except that it will allow you to not have to spend time checking the blog for new posts.