A previous note reports on the integration and the design for the reborn FilmsFolded.com UI. After working that out, I turned to the desired underlying web publishing frameworks and unsuccessfully interviewed some potential coders. I think I will defer that end of the thing for a month, because once I focused on the database itself, it grew in immediate importance and effort.
Toby wrote some scraper code that fueled the previous iterations. It just goes to IMDB (and also in more recent versions themoviedb.org) and copies some stuff. He wrote some accompanying scripts that apparently prettified the content, but given the state of the comments this was inconsistent.
So I decided that to do this right: the database has to be built pretty much from scratch, so as to have it be as useful as we need.
The Old Presentation
I have begun a Filemaker Pro (version 12) database. I‘ll worry about how it gets published and married up to the web UI later. For now, the effort is just to give us a clean, useful record, and this involves a lot of repetitive, dumb work. When I get to Virginia Beach, I will hire a student to do the heavy lifting.
The reborn database is enriched beyond what we had before. We now have new fields for:
- nationality
- both English and (unicode) non-English titles if the film is non-English
- year of film (we had this before, but it is not in the record I have)
- date of original posting to IMDB
- TheMovieDB.org entry number (if there is one)
- the Tedg rating for films, including those before the ratings started — and incorporating the changes in the lists of fours.
In terms of the comments themselves:
- spelling errors are being been corrected, but I have retained my portmanteau spellings (runon words that usually would be hyphenated)
- typographic conventions have been normalized to conform to the rest of the site (bullets, em-dash, quotes)
- similarly, though the original IMDB text is unstyled, I do introduce italics for emphasis and for film names
- I have a tag for whether a comment has been rewritten or extended, though no rewriting has yet occurred
A Record in the New Database
(I have a previous Filemaker database, a rather huge affair with a hodgepodge of information in it, including hundreds of other films. None of this is essential to the current project. It is a low priority, but that additional information may be linked in for my desktop use if it is easy. It is too early to know the difficulty. None will appear in the web interface.)
The big improvement from the current effort is that the comments will be integrated into the essays by being tagged by the folding conventions addressed by those essays. I will be starting this effort in parallel with cleaning the database. Probably, this will be by a separate table of qualities that is relationally linked into the film list.