Rebuilding MovieLandmarks

I'm in the process of rewriting the site from scratch. I've now added 'breadcrumbs' to the navigation bar at the top and a 'Buy Movie' link to all the trailer and move media pages.

Minor Changes

Added a dab of CSS to the media display, and a temporary 'Reset' link to return it to showing all the movie covers and landmarks after you've clicked on a movie title.

Trailers and Media now working

Ok, I updated the site with some more code tonight. It now shows the movie trailer info when a cover is clicked on and shows the landmark media (movie clips and photos) when a landmark is clicked on.

Screw Revenue, I'm going to have Fun!

I started MovieLandmarks about a year ago as a fun project. I started and stopped a few times, but have not been able to let go of the idea. There are other attempts at similar projects but none do what I want them to. I convinced myself that if I was making some money from it that I'd work on it more. So I got sidetracked into trying to get Google's advertisements working on it. They don't. Basically their context sensitive ads suck.

So, I'm going to throw it all out. Or most of it. And rewrite it from scratch like I first envisioned it, as a AJAX/Web2.0/buzzword of the moment interactive application.

The next rev is still called take2, because I'm too lazy to change the domain name. You can follow the progress here at take2.movielandmarks.com

Right now I have the new cover browser up, landmarks and clusters are being displayed, floating titles for them are working (had to tweak TLabel a bit to work with the new Google data API) and you can click on things and the map zooms in on them.

Over the next (insert random() period of time), things will advance, break, advance some more. Feel free to submit suggestions -- but don't count on me implementing any of them. Right now this is my toy and I'm going to have fun with it.

Oh, and I'm probably going to stop calling it a 'search engine' at some point. Sounds a bit too full of itself now that I read it again.

MovieLandmarks Website Take2

Last night I updated the website to the new design. The changes are pretty extensive, I started with the goal of making it work correctly in IE7 and that Google Ads have the ability to spider the site and display context ads. I had to do away with a number of the AJAX based features so that the pages would be rendered with their content accessible to spiders. This means that there are now page reloads with most things are selected.

I still think that Google needs to provide an API for 100% AJAX enabled pages to feed content for the ad bots. But I think Ive reached a good tradeoff in the design.

Added social bookmark links

Using informtion from this blog post, I have added icons linking the movies and landmarks to a variety of the most popular social bookmarking sites. I wanted to use the javascript button from www.addthis.com, but because of the way MovieLandmarks works (100% AJAX) I'd have to insert the script dynamically into the page -- which doesn't seem to work very well.

So, I just added links with the logos. They all seem to work just fine.

Added a 'Mail This' feature

I just implemented a simple 'Mail This' feature in about 10 minutes. Instead of setting up a fancy form that could be exploited by spammers I opted for the reliable old mailto: link. It ends up that you don't need a email address in the link, and that you can fill in the subject and body easily.

For example, the mailto: link for A Christmas Story looks like this:

mailto:?subject=MovieLandmarks.com%20-%20A%20Christmas%20Story%20&body=Check%20out%20this%20MovieLandmarks.com%20location%3A%20http%3A//www.movielandmarks.com/%23movie-B0000AYJUW%0A%0AMovieLandmarks%20is%20a%20movie%20and%20TV%20location%20search%20engine.%0A%0A

You simply pass it a ?subject= and a &body filled with the relevant location and link information. This way the email comes directly from the person, not from an intermediate server, spammers can't exploit the feature to send their crap under your name, and the message is more personal.

Make sure the contents of the subject and body are escaped using the javascript escape() function so that things like quotes won't mess up the link.