Structural Change

If you've stumbled across this site in the past, and are coming back now for some benighted reason, you may be noticing a change in the way the Reel Reviews are being posted. No longer will individual movie reviews be organized according to the old habit of lumping everything together by alphabetical title. Now, each individual review will be its own post.

This make sense on a number of levels, and the change should have been implemented much sooner. For one thing, individual posts makes each of the reviews substantially more search friendly. While organizing all of the reviews alphabetically allowed for easier browsing of reviews that were not the object of the original search--just scroll through the list and find something interesting--the plain fact is that anyone reading this site probably is not really that interested in scrolling through that long list (especially under popular alphabetical titles, as with the 'S' or 'M' titles). Also, individual posts make creating the links in the sidebar substantially easier. They also make manually date-stamping each post's content unnecessary, since every post is automatically date and time stamped. Overall, I think it will be a cleaner, more efficient way of recording these reviews.

It will still be possible to browse reviews alphabetically, since all review posts will still get the individual letter-appropriate 'Reel Reviews -- ?' tag (where the ? represents a given alphabetical). Just click on the tag from the list in the sidebar and up will pop all the titles under that letter--except in 'most recent' rather than alphabetical order. Plus, individual posts will allow for other tags to be applied to a review, such as 'Comedy' or 'Drama' for an appropriate film, so that a complete list of any genre can be called up just with a click.

As time and gumption permits, I will be converting old, lumped together review posts to individual postings. The 'new-old' posts will get a new date and time stamp, but I'll keep the original 'Posted 00/00/00' date in the copy to distinguish those reviews from more recent stuff. Let's hope this all works out well and makes this database of movie reviews even more useful than ever before.

UPDATE: I've realized after the fact that I can back date posts if I so choose, and I'll do so on the older Reel Reviews posts. But I'll still keep the original 'posted on' dates in the text to easily distinguish old posts from the newer reviews.