Tag Archives: link

a new tool for quick movie lookups across multiple sites

Movie-Mine - discover hidden gems!

When deciding whether to watch a movie, it helps to consider ratings and reviews from multiple sources, but this can be time-consuming. Film sites often have search facilities and movie info pages with links to selected reviews. However, presumably for competitive reasons, the best “meta-review” sites seldom link to each other. This makes it slower than it should be to search across many sites at once. That’s why I’ve created Movie-Mine, a meta-meta-search tool. It has a fast, incremental search that finds partial movie titles with minimal typing.

After you select an entry for a suggested matching title, Movie-Mine displays a page of basic movie information, including links to related pages on the most important film sites. For those sites to which a direct link is not yet known, Movie-Mine provides an appropriate Google site search, as indicated by a dashed border around the link. Links with a solid border should lead directly to the desired page on that site, without the need to go through an intermediate Google site search.

In some cases, most notably for links to Metacritic, the expected page may not be found. (These errors might be due to Metacritic’s having changed their page naming conventions.) Please feel free to report any erroneous links, so we can do our best to fix them. In the meantime, note that IMDb movie pages generally display summary Metacritic information, when available.

summary of the best movie information and review sites

Movies are a great source of entertainment, but choosing the next movie to watch can be challenging. You don’t want to waste your time watching a disappointing movie. On the other hand, you can’t afford to spend too much time making a choice. The problem isn’t due to a lack of information, but an over-abundance. To help navigate more efficiently through the maze of movie information that’s available online, I’ve put together a compact summary of essential movie resources, including links to the most useful pages on those sites. If you’re looking for ideas about which movies to see, beyond what’s currently playing in theaters, this should be a pretty good starting point.

permalinks in WordPress

The primary link to be used in external references to this post, its permalink, began as http://www.ideaxchg.com/?p=166, using WordPress’ default permalink format.  It would be friendlier to users and search engines to provide a more meaningful format of permalink URLs.

To change from WordPress’ default numeric style of permalinks, use the Settings, Permalinks command in the Dashboard.  I’m selecting the simple “Post name” format, without any date portion.  Since each post begins with a line that includes the posting date, that will suffice for my purposes, and I’d prefer to keep permalinks short.  (The equivalent custom structure permalink specification for this is /%postname%/.)

Related references:

links in WordPress

Not to be confused with the “Link” format of posting, WordPress supports a fairly elaborate mechanism for defining and categorizing what it calls “Links”.  The purpose of these is somewhat obscured by the fact the default WordPress configuration doesn’t enable their display, although it provides a conspicuous group of Links administration facilities in the WordPress Dashboard.  There is also a sampling of links to various official WordPress resource pages, assigned to the link category “Blogroll”, but where are these links supposed to appear?

The answer is that WordPress Links are used to display a “Blogroll” on your home page, but you need to enable this feature by going into the WordPress Dashboard’s Appearance, Widgets screen.  In that screen, drag the Links item from the “Available Widgets” area into the “Main Sidebar” area at the desired position relative to the other widgets listed.  Now your site will show a new section of the main sidebar, with heading “BLOGROLL”, listing the provided sample of links to WordPress resources.

WordPress Links can be categorized, for example “Blogroll” is just the default Link Category, but you needn’t use that category name, and you can define any number of additional Link Categories.  Link Categories, however, are distinct and different from categories of Posts.  Unlike posting categories, link categories have no hierarchical structure, so it might help to think of link categories as being more like a special type of tags. What the Links widget does is simply to list each link category as a heading in the sidebar, and under that heading to display the links assigned to that category.  Link categories are listed in alphabetical order, and links under each category are listed alphabetically by link name (by default – there are additional options for the Links widget).

The preceding remarks apply to WordPress under the Twenty Eleven theme, using WordPress 3.4.2.  Other WordPress themes may deal differently with Links, and there are a variety of WordPress plugins available, for more flexible and sophisticated ways of presenting links.  Here are some helpful references about WordPress Links:

sample post using “Link” format

The Link format of posting is another compact flavor of posting, very similar to the Aside format, except that it displays the heading “LINK” instead of “ASIDE” in the main blog page or archive page in which the entry is listed.

What http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats says about this format:

link – A link to another site. Themes may wish to use the first <a href=””> tag in the post content as the external link for that post. An alternative approach could be if the post consists only of a URL, then that will be the URL and the title (post_title) will be the name attached to the anchor for it.