FancyIndex: Seeking template feedback

[marumari]

Hubie / Conor - go ahead and give it another shot with this new code. I've found it to be 200-300% faster in my testing.

Make sure to do a hard refresh to make sure you get the newest fi.shared.js file.

[Conor]

Wow! That truly is an amazing speed boost. It's a bit scary as you are now almost achieve Pedia like speeds. I have included the new file in the shipping template and it's available in the beta 31 for anybody who doesn't know how to customize your template. I also updated to ignore the "An" article as I didn't see that there.

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         // Remove any instances of "The", "A " and "An" at the beginning of a string
			s = s.toLowerCase();
			if (s.substr(0,4) === "the ") { return s.substr(4); }
			else if (s.substr(0,3) === "an ") { return s.substr(3); }
			else if (s.substr(0,2) === "a ") { return s.substr(2); }
			else { return s; }

Thank you so much for improving that, I am sure a lot of users will be thrilled including Hubie.

[marumari]

Conor - I think I've made some changes since you list pulled the file in, namely updates to how Chrome resizes the table.

You may want to grab the latest version from here:

http://www.twoevils.org/html/mygames/Im ... .shared.js

For 4.6.2.

[sitenoise]

Beautiful. Simply beautiful. I'm in love with whomever gifted this template to the peoples.

Here's a couple tweaks to consider:

In the FancyIndexDetails Header ... I changed

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<!--IFyear <span class="cbsubtitle">([key:year])</span> ENDyear-->

to

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<!--IFtheatrical <span class="cbsubtitle">[key:theatrical]</span> ENDtheatrical-->

but I'm confused by "year", "theatrical", and "releaseDate" keys, and all I care about is the theatrical date and nothing was showing up in the header when "year" was the key.


For consistency, you might consider adding <target="_blank"> to the links in the credits.


A few things that might interest other folks:

I added links to 'Ratings' and 'Awards' since these things update after I've added a title to DVDPedia

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<!--IFrating <tr><td class="cbtrans"><A href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt[key:imdb]/ratings" target="_blank">[translate:Ratings]</a>:</td><td class="cbkeys">[key:rating]</td></tr> ENDrating-->

<!--IFawards <tr><td class="cbtrans"><A href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt[key:imdb]/awards" target="_blank">[translate:awards]</a>:</td><td class="cbkeys">[key:awards]</td></tr> ENDawards-->

I also bumped up the (US) Amazon asin search (controversial) and but more cool I've added Netflix and YouTube Trailer searches to <div class="cbdata cbdatacol2"> ... so:

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<table>
		<!--IFgenre <tr><td class="cbtrans">[translate:genre]:</td><td class="cbkeys">[key:genre]</td></tr> ENDgenre-->
		<!--IFimdb <tr><td class="cbtrans">[translate:imdb]:</td><td class="cbkeys"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt[key:imdb]/" target="_blank">[key:imdb]</a></td></tr> ENDimdb-->
                        
                 <!--IFasin<tr><td class="cbtrans">[translate:Amazon]:</td><td class="cbkeys"><a href="http://amazon.com/dp/[key:asin]" target="_blank">[key:asin]</a></td></tr> ENDasin-->
                       
                <tr><td class="cbtrans">[translate:Search]:</td><td class="cbkeys"><A href="http://www.netflix.com/Search?ff2_submit.x=16&ff2_submit.y=13&v1=[key:title]" target="_blank">Netflix</A> • <a href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=[key:title]+trailer" target="_blank">YouTube</a></td></tr>
</table>

[Conor]

Thank you for all the improvements, enhancements and updates.

@Marumari. A small tweak I've done to your template is optimize the article ignored sorting. Since no matter what happens you will be lowercasing the string it's better to do it once at the beginning that several times. You might want to include it for you own use as well:

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			s = s.toLowerCase();
			if (s.substr(0,4) === "the ") { return s.substr(4); }
			else if (s.substr(0,3) === "an ") { return s.substr(3); }
			else if (s.substr(0,2) === "a ") { return s.substr(2); }
			else { return s; }

[marumari]

Conor -

Go ahead and put that into the fi.shared.js file that gets distributed with all the *pedias. The nice thing is that fi.shared.js is the same between all four versions of the template, so you can just copy it to each of them. You shouldn't need to make the tweak to each file.

Can you also add target="_blank" to the credit links, as so? There should be four links in the FancyIndexDetails.html file for DVDPedia.

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				<!--IFcredits
						<span class="cbcredits">
							<table>
								<tr><td><a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?s=nm&q=[key:director]" target="_blank">[key:director]</td><td>  ...  </td><td>([translate:director])</td></tr>
								<tr><td><a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?s=nm&q=[key:writer]" target="_blank">[key:writer]</td><td>  ...  </td><td>([translate:writer])</td></tr>
								<tr><td colspan="3"> </td>
								[creditsBegin]<tr><td><a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?s=nm&q=[credit:name]" target="_blank">[credit:name]</td><td>  ...  </td><td><a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?s=ch&q=[credit:role]" target="_blank">[credit:role]</a></td></tr>[creditsEnd]
							</table>
						</span>
					ENDcredits-->

I agree with ual that the year at the top of the details page on the DVD listing should be the theatrical release date, not the DVD or Blu-Rays release date. Unfortunately, since all the other dates follow the YYYY-MM-DD format, it would have the theatrical release date in the long format on top of each entry. I'm inclined to think that, really, [key:year] should be the theatrical release date year for DVDpedia, originalReleaseDate year for CDpedia, and the release date year for the other two. Thoughts?

[sitenoise]

I changed the date format to just YYYY.

[sitenoise]

Say, is there a way ... if I understand this properly ... to EXPORT (I'm using ftp) without the RSS sharing files? I don't need an RSS feed on the site and the xml files just add bulk and take time.

[Nora]

Edit the template and get rid of this line:

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="sharing/list.rss" />

[sitenoise]

Edit the template and get rid of this line:

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="sharing/list.rss" />

OK, so I removed that line and it still exported all the kagillion xml files. But yes, now there is no feed available.

As feedback, and I don't know that this is really peculiar to the FancyIndex template, but the RSS feed that results is pretty weird, imo, having nothing to do with, or showing any of, my information. What it has is:

a big image that appeared to come from Amazon (if image not in Amazon, no image), then
Director
Studio
Rated
Genre
Duration
Price
" Read more…" (which is just a link to whatever is in my URL field.

Four of those six "Field" bits of info are not present in anything about my html export, and weirdest of all, the "Source" link, which displays the title of my exported collection, is actually a link <http://www.bruji.com/sharing> that goes to the Bruji Homepage. I would have thought it would go to the URL of my export.

I didn't know what to expect, as I'm not interested in the RSS feed, but all this seems kind of weird and useless. It's kind of just a wannabe list of advertisements for Amazon, except the URL link doesn't often go there because I usually never have it in my URL field.

Again, I don't personally care about what the RSS feed does because I don't use it. It just seems weird to me. But I would really like to not have to export, and wait for, all the xml files to upload during ftp.

I don't know if you remember me, but I use DVDPedia as a movie reference, not a DVD collection, so I've got collections with over a thousand titles.

[marumari]

To be honest, I tried to figure out a way to remove all the RSS and xml bits (because they're useless with FancyIndex), but I couldn't figure out a way to completely turn it off. So, I left the RSS bits in so at least they'd have some use.

[sjk]

…, but I use DVDPedia as a movie reference, not a DVD collection, …

DVDpedia is a bit too ownership-centric for my more general Moviepedia-style usage. I hope it'll eventually add a few features that more directly/conveniently supported rental/theatre/TV viewing, for instance.

[kbarnes70]

DVDpedia is a bit too ownership-centric for my more general Moviepedia-style usage. I hope it'll eventually add a few features that more directly/conveniently supported rental/theatre/TV viewing, for instance.

Interesting. What features would you need for, say, a rental-based "collection"? I currently have a "Seen on TV" collection - I just get the movie info from IMDb and have made a couple of custom fields that show when I watched it and so on. What else do you have in mind?

Kind regards,

Keith

[sitenoise]

Yeah, I'm doing pretty well with DVDPedia as a reference, research, and information tool. It's wonderfully customizable and extensible. I think Conor missed the memo that went out to Mac developers in the 90s saying "The Killer App is dead."

[kbarnes70]

Conor missed the memo that went out to Mac developers in the 90s saying "The Killer App is dead."

Keith