Tag Archives: search

Movie-Mine extends its reach by tapping into the semantic web

Movie-Mine has undergone another round of significant enhancements, both in its search capability and its coverage of a large number of movies. Our title lookup facility now supports even faster “fuzzy” searching, employing Google’s recently released Knowlege Graph tools. Also we’ve substantially increased Movie-Mine’s scope with more film details, more titles, and more current information by incorporating content from Wikidata. What this means is that with minimum keystrokes and clicks, Movie-Mine immediately delivers a bunch of helpful information about any of hundreds of thousands of movies, without subjecting you to a deluge of advertising.

If you want to check out a particlar movie, the most efficient procedure is to start with a Movie-Mine title lookup. This quickly provides you with information that may be sufficient to make an immediate viewing decision. It also provides you with links to get more about that movie from many other reputable sites. Of course, most movie sites offer some sort of basic lookup and access to movie data, but not as fast and “fat-free” as Movie-Mine, and not with as egalitarian an attitude about linking to other good sites.

What really sets Movie-Mine apart, though, is its unique ability to attach your own private annotations to each movie. This enables you to transform movie selection into a gradual, incremental process. Instead of painfully going over the same ground again and again, you can come back to a viewing candidate and pick up from where you last left off, using your previous notes as a reminder. In this way, Movie-Mine isn’t just another movie site – it’s the logical starting point for using all of the best movie sites.

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.

migrating to WordPress – the easy way

As of December 5, 2012, the IdeaXchg home page became a WordPress-generated blog page.  Previously, the entire site was created and maintained through FrontPage, but this became increasingly cumbersome and outdated, since Microsoft stopped supporting FrontPage long ago.

I was not looking forward to the daunting prospect of converting lots of old pages into WordPress, but I did want to preserve much of this old content, at least for the time being.  So what I’ve done is simply to keep many old pages at their old URLs, while replacing the site’s old home page with the new WordPress-based home page.  This allows me to use WordPress, while simultaneously keeping most of the old site exactly as it was, for the benefit of search engines and visitors.

As a former user of FrontPage, it was not immediately obvious that this simple approach, intermixing WordPress and non-WordPress content, could be done so easily, because FrontPage is notoriously finicky about such games.  Any addition of content to a FrontPage web has to be done through FrontPage, or one risks disastrous consequences.  Barring any obvious naming conflicts, there is no such danger with WordPress.

Of course, I’ve only punted on the conversion of old pages into WordPress, but that’s OK with me – I’m no purist.  The site didn’t get any worse than it was before, and now I can convert what old pages I care to in my own sweet time.  Meanwhile, I’ve gained immediate access to the full power of WordPress.

It should be noted, however, that the WordPress Search Widget does not encompass any non-WordPress content.  I can live with that, since my FrontPage-based Search pages stopped working a while ago, and Google search within site is more than adequate.

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