moviestring.com the the blog

i know it’s been awhile since we last sat down and chatted, but we’ve been super busy the past few weeks putting the final touches on some great new stuff. so we thought we’d update you on a couple of the new features:

1. new design
   hopefully you’ve noticed we’ve got a spanking new design. in addition to just looking much nicer, it also streamlines navigation and makes better use of screen real estate. the new design will make it much easier for use to add new features and will hopefully make the site a little easier to use. we’re still tweeking the design, so if you have any suggestions feel free to email them to us.
2. twitter reviews
   we’re huge fans of Twitter here at moviestring and we figured why not include some of twitters great content into the site. so we decided to use the awesome twitter search api to aggregate tweets containing movie reviews. we’re still refining the filter algorithm, so some non-reviews might slip through. when you see on, be sure to mark it as “not a review”. try it out
3. youtube reviews
   since we sometimes get lazy and don’t like reading, we figure why not also add some video to moviestring. we’re really stoked to add Youtube video reviews to movie pages. just click the “reviews on Youtube” tab on any movie page (like this one) and we’ll aggregate video reviews of the movie. try it out
4. facebook app
   back by popular demand, we’ve fixed the facebook app and added a few new features (with plenty more to come). also new: now when you post a review, we’ll add it to your news feed. add the app now

that’s it for now. please feel free to email us with any suggestion you might have. you can email info@moviestring.com or me directly travis@moviestring.com

that’s right… videoified. since it seems typing is so 2007, we’ve added some videos to moviestring.com.

trailers
now there’s no need to visit youtube and hunt down a trailer just to find out what an upcoming movie is about. just visit it’s movie page, click the link labeled “watch & review the trailer” (look for the little tv) and we’ll search for the latest trailers on youtube. and as an added bonus, you can even write a review of the trailer to share with your friends.

video reviews
don’t feel like typing out that long review? already reviewed a bunch of movies on youtube? well now you can add a video to any of your movie reviews. that’s right, just click the link labeled “add a video review” and either enter your youtube username or paste the youtube URL of your video. it’s just that simple to post your video review of a movie. and don’t forget to also write a quick summary of your video review, for those crazy people that still like reading.

for those techie people (like us): all of our videos are powered by the youtube.com api. the api is truly awesome and makes integration extremely simple.

as always if you have any questions or comments you can email info@moviestring.com or me directly at travis@moviestring.com

ever wanted to build a kick-ass movie app, but couldn’t find any place to get movie information? want to integrate moviestring.com reviews into your site? well now you can do both. we’re proud to announce developer.moviestring.com

our developer section provides a several apis (with many more to come) to access not only moviestring.com reviews, but also our entire database of over 20,000 movies and 150,00 people. using the api is as simple as registering your api. once your app is registered, start making some calls and build cool stuff.

go to developer.moviestring.com

if you haven’t already notices we’ve revamped both the non-logged in and logged in pages (splash and me pages, respectively). here’s some of the new features to both.

splash page

• login without any clicks: no more having to go to the login page. now you can login right from the homepage
• register on the homepage: we’ve made it easier than ever to register for an account. just hit the homepage, fill out the registration form and you’re ready to go.
• new and improved ‘write a review’ box (really applies to all pages but why not review it here): we’ve rewritten the review box to be much cleaner and cross-browser compatible (even works in IE). we’ve also modified the search results to display the poster instead of the movie title (you can still get the movie title by hovering over the poster).

me page

• da tabs… da tabs: now instead of just the latest reviews from people you like, you can get reviews filtered by ‘awesomeness’, ‘upcoming movies’, ‘movies in theaters’, etc. all right from your me page.
• cleaner: we’ve cleaned up the entire me page to make it less cluttered and easier to navigate
• what’s new: the what’s new section provides you a list of the cool new features we’ve added

also don’t forget to check out the twitter integration. http://moviestring.com/profile#twitter

we just finished the facebook app. and we’d love to see what you think. install the app at: http://apps.new.facebook.com/moviestring/. right now the app is pretty much just a copy of the normal site, but we’re planing on some cool facebook only features.

if you have any problems with the app please email us at: info@moviestring.com or you can always use bugzilla (bugs.moviestring.com)

don’t forget to add our tab if you’re using the new facebook layout, hit the big + button at the end of the tabs list on your profile page to add the moviestring tab

so we experienced about an hour of downtime today between 5:00pm to 6:00pm PST. turns out someone tripped over the big plug and brought down the whole site. don’t worry though, that person has been tarred, feathered, publicly flogged, made to watch “crossroads” repeatedly and promptly fired.

really though, there was a problem during our ssl certificate instillation that forced us to switch master IPs. this caused most of the sub-domains to fail and have to be recreated. once we got all that sorted out, we had to correct some configuration issues with the CDN server, which took a little longer than expected. but after all that we’re back up and running.

so after all that, we now have an installed and working ssl server. so you can be sure your information is safely transferred over the intertubes-webs-things when you visit us.

part one of “new feature friday” saw three big updates. two that you can see and one behind the scene.

1. homepage review tabs
   we’ve added three new tabs to the homepage that allow you to sort the reviews different ways
   • “latest” - the original sort shows you the latest reviews submitted
   • “popular” - will show you reviews with the most “awesome” votes
   • “in theaters” - will show you reviews for movies that are currently in theaters
   • “upcoming” - will show you reviews for movies that will be in theaters this week
2. in-page search
   we’ll admit the whole “go to a new page to search” thing was kind of lame, i mean it is 2008… the age of web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now, i can never keep track). so we changed all of that. now when you click the “find movies” button at the top of the page, a window will side open with a text field. start typing in the text field (labeled “search for movies”) and you’ll be shown the 10 best results we can find.

   and if you really liked the old search page, you can find it at moviestring.com/find

3. utf-8 support we want to start out by apologizing for the lack of utf-8 support in the RC1 release. it was something we kept putting off and then totally forgot. but we’ve got it now, with our pages and rss feeds now outputting proper utf-8 encoding. if you still find problems please let us know!

stay tuned… cause there may be a part two to “new feature friday“

so we noticed one glaring hole in our RC1 feature list… movie search. we got so wrapped up in the movie reviews that we forgot to actually make it easy to find the movies you’re looking for.

so we threw together a search page that you can find at:
moviestring.com/find

just start typing a movie title and we’ll do our best to find the movie you’re looking for. we’ll admit that our search algorithm isn’t that great. but we promise we’ll continue working on it over the next few days.

and now for a little tease of what’s coming before the next release… an app for one of those newfangled iphones we keep hearing about. we’re almost done and i have to admit it’s looking pretty good. let us know if you have any features you’d like to see.

yes, after a couple weeks we’ve finally finished our initial feature set and are already hard at work putting together features for the next major release (some time by Sept 6th… mark your calendars). you might be asking “things look a little light, what happened?” well as we mentioned before, we had to drop all of the alpha tester’s posts, since many we’re what you would call… useful. but a big thanks to everyone who helped out during alpha testing, you all did an awesome job and we know you’ll keep posting.

so now to the important stuff, what’s in release one. well here’s a short list of features to get you going

• post mini-reviews (obvious i know, but i wanted the list to look big)
• replay to other users reviews
• follow users you love (or really like if the word love makes you uncomfortable)
• flag awesome reviews for other users to easily find
• send users notes about movies, other users, pretty much anything
• create a ’shelf’ of movies you really like
• email review system
• rss feeds for user reviews, reviews for movies and people you love’s reviews (much more coming soon)
• and some more stuff i can’t think of right now

i know it doesn’t sound that impressive, but check out the list of features for the next release…

• full api that allows you to get movie info, user reviews, really everything in our database
• showtime listings customized to your zip code
• better sorting of reviews on user pages
• iphone app (probably a web app at first)
• facebook app
• movies search
• probably a lot of bug fixes

and while we’re on the subject of bug fixes, we’d like to take a moment to ask for your help in entering bugs that you find around the site. you can either enter them online at bugs.moviestring.com or send an email to new@bugs.moviestring.com (this will automatically open a new ticket for you). thanks!

last, but certainly not least, if you enjoy moviestring.com, we need your help in spreading the word. so please make sure to tell your friend, parents, next-door-neighbors, enemies, dogs, gold fish, big foot, keira knightley… anyone you think would like moviestring.com to join now, before all the cool user names are gone.

we’ll admit it… we’re a twitter clone. i mean who doesn’t love twitter. but we hope to offer you a little more focus in your micro-blogging life. since we love movies (and we hope you do too) we figured why not take what’s great about twitter and apply it to movie reviews… and out poped moviestring.com. we’re here to make your movie going experience easier in three ways:

1. give you a quick and simple way to write reviews of your favorate movies. with our movie finder (pulling from our catalog of over 21,000 titles) you can quickly find the movie you want to review. and none of that long-winded, novel length review nonsense. you’ve got 255 characters to share your thoughts about a movie (honestly any more than that and your just showing off).

2. allow you to find reviews from other people. we know how much going to a bad movie sucks. and i think we can all agree that main stream movie “critics” don’t always get it right. so we want to provide you with the easiest way to find reviews from real people, like you (assuming you are a real person). that’s why we make it easy to find reviews for a movie quickly.

3. let you take your reviews and our data anywhere. whether it’s reading or writing reviews from your iphone. using your favoriate rss reader to keep track of reviews for ‘dark knight’. or using our developer api to create an awesome mashup. we want you to have access to our data in any way you want it.

so hopefully you’ll find moviestring usefully. make sure to check back often, as we’ve got plenty of feature coming soon. and if you’ve got a killer idea, please drop us an email and we’ll see what we can do.