Ted Goranson - Personal Blog

I am now in Shanghai for a month. Although worktime is limited here, I do have some.

My goal is to start on the rebirth of the FilmsFolded essays, that were begun some years ago.

These will be placed here, using an organization that has been pretty stable for a while. I'll just jam on that as best I can, posting drafts for comments.

Meanwhile, either I will get Toby to rebuild the old FilmsFolded site, or pay someone to do it. That has presented a challenge in terms of how to reshape it to serve this project. There are two challenges:

• How to integrate my comments into the project. Some of them are interesting and many refer to the sort of dynamics we will talk about in the essays. But few are actually where I would point someone for supplimental information from the essays. They are more emotionally connected to the experience. But I wouldn't want to lose this, because writing them is part of the passion of the experience.
• How to integrate your comments and guidance on what is going on here. For the essays, that is simple: each page has a comment section. But having a web comment area for each page of my movie comments would simply be too ponderous to help.

My thinking at this point is that I will restart the IMDB comments, and use Toby's scrubber code to transport them to FilmsFolded where you can subscribe via RSS and search the comments (as before). This will actually be a separate site, but the designs will be similar and the connection back and forth (between filmsfolded.tedgoranson.com and filmsfolded.com) should appear seamless.

In the essays, I will try to use films as examples, each time pointing to the entry on FF which is anchored by the IMDB comment. It will in fact be a database that tags films according to the dynamics. So over time, you will have somewhere persistent searches like "show all films (in this database) that employ the show within-the-show." By checking that one and others (for example a ted-rating selection) you could collect examples. This would be instead of the full text search, which would still be available. Have done some thinking about how this work work for a user.

The point is that we can then have a comment area for the page that shows when the prefab search appears. That means a few score comment areas on themes instead of instances for those who would rather comment on the films or my comment than the corresponding page in the essay.

A challenge is how to manage the database. Currently, I have it started in Filemaker. We'll see if that is tenable (published to mySQL) or an administrator's web interface for the mySQL database..