MovieLandmarks

Rebuilding MovieLandmarks

2008-11-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-07-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-14T21:46:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-07-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-10T09:17:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-23T11:13:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-23T09:02:00.001-08:00

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.

Google Misses the Web 2.0 Boat

2007-11-14T18:58:00.001-08:00

I find it ironic that the company that single-handedly kicked off the Ajax/Web 2.0 craze is failing so miserably when it comes to supporting advertising on sites that take advantage of techniques they pioneered. I've pulled my attempt at adding AdSense ads to MovieLandmarks after only a day -- they were display stupid things like thong bikinis and sonic software. Nothing even remotely related to movies.

I've replaced them with Amazon DVD ads. Hopefully those will be more successful. At least they blend with the site.

If Google wants to succeed on Ajax sites they need to provide website creators with a way to feed content to the ad system. Otherwise you just end up with totally irrelevant ads and not much revenue.

AdSense on AJAX Pages

2007-11-13T22:18:00.000-08:00

MovieLandmarks is a 100% AJAX page. This makes it a really nice site to explore for people, but not so friendly for the Google AdSense system. I'm experimenting with AdSense ads over on the right side of the map, hopefully with the addition of the directory it will start showing some relevant ads in a day or so. I have it setup to refresh the ad when the movie selection changes, but I don't know if it can pick up the change to the location using hashes or not.

I'd really like it if I could 'feed' the adsense system the dynamic content from the page, but apparently it doesn't work like that.

I don't like the idea of having ads for fireplaces or sonic software being shown all the time, so if it doesn't improve in a few days I'll probably pull it off.

Making it refresh is pretty easy. Create a div for your adsense ad, put your adsense code into it and then call this function to refresh it:


/* Refresh the Google Ad iframe
*/
function refreshAd( content ) {
   var d=document.getElementById('adsense');
   if(d){
       var s=d.getElementsByTagName('iframe');
       if(s && s.length){
            s[0].src=s[0].src+'&'+new Date().getTime();
       }
   }
   return true;
}

The content argument is there so I could experiment with feeding it content (which doesn't work).

Veronica Mars Canceled?!

2007-11-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I've had my head buried in other things recently. I finished Season 3 of Veronica Mars the other night and while I didn't think it was the best season it was still far better than anything else I've seen on TV. As I'm adding landmarks for the series I discovered that CW has canceled the show and it hasn't been picked up anywhere else. I'm bummed.

A Directory for MovieLandmarks.com

2007-11-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

I just finished adding a directory of the movies we have in the database. Its a simple alphabetical list with the movie names, landmark names and media text descriptions. Its main purpose is to give search engines something to index and visitors a place to land. Since the main MovieLandmarks page is 100% AJAX there isn't much for the search engines to index there.

MovieLandmarks.com now works with IE

2007-11-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

I think I've solved the Internet Explorer problems with the site. The fixes were pretty simple:


/* Replace getElementById with a function to try it the right way first,
then the IE way
*/
document._getElementById = document.getElementById;
document.getElementById = function(id) {
  var e = this._getElementById(id);
  if(!e || e.id == id)
       { return e; }
  return window[id];// try the IE way
}

IE apparently doesn't implement getElementById properly, so if it fails you try using the window method. This seems to have fixed all of my div id lookups.

The google map also wasn't displaying, this was because the 'map' variable wasn't declared in the global scope first (in Firefox if there is no var it assumes global, in IE apparently you have to explicitly declare it first). Simply adding var map = null; at the top of the javascript solved this problem.

I use the GDownloadUrl() function for all my back end calls, so compatibility isn't an issue there.

Let me know if you have any problems viewing in IE.

MovieLandmarks.com v1.0!

2007-11-06T22:41:00.000-08:00

I released the new code at noon today, Jayson has been testing it for the last 24 hours and other than some minor glitches it looks good! The changes include a much faster method of rendering landmarks, using clustering from Mike Purvis' post on the Sydney Blug site, trailers for the movies when you click on the cover and a cleaner interface for logging in and registering.

We now have about 42 landmarks for The Blues Brothers, one of my favorite movies of all time.

We can always use more help, come register and add a couple of landmarks for your favorite movie or TV show. What else are you going to do, now that the writers are on strike?

New MovieLandmarks is Almost Ready

2007-11-04T22:44:00.001-08:00

Its late, so I'll keep this short -- the new version of MovieLandmarks is almost ready. I'd hoped to release it tonight, but there's still a couple of bugs to be worked out. Hopefully sometime this week. Its going to be a huge improvement on the current codebase, much faster and with some added features like Trailers being show when the movie cover is selected.

'night!

A Christmas Story

2007-11-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

I took a break from working on improving the site to add a few more landmarks to the 'Christmas Story' entry. We have the house (which is open for tours!), the school, the department store and the Chinese Restaurant.

Welcome!

2007-11-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the MovieLandmarks blog. I'm going to be discussing some of the behind the scenes work on the site here, as well as answering any questions visitors may have.

The MovieLandmarks site is a search engine for the filming locations of movies and TV shows. It is an AJAX site, using Javascript with PHP on the server side, that allows you to explore the landmarks in a variety of ways. You can search by movie title, location or browse the movies in the database. You can also use Google Earth to view them.

Right now the production site is a bit slow -- the way I originally wrote the javascript was not optimized for so many landmarks (over 350 at last count!). I am working on a faster system that will hopefully be rolled out soon.