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.

Graphic Enhancement

Faithful readers of this blog--as if--have by now gotten used to my long-standing ratings system for movies and books: the + for a positive review, a ~ for a "so-so" review, and a -- for a negative review.

Using those characters for symbols never quite worked. They disappear into the text, and the tilde for a "so-so" character--it's supposed to represent that hand wiggle you do when you somatically describe something as "so-so"--is almost non-existent in some fonts, and is particularly so in MM's preferred font, Raleway.

Thankfully, I've been learning a thing or two about this web stuff, and that includes the wonderful thing called FontAwesome. It's a web-based symbol font that anyone--which includes me--can use to add some easy graphic elements to his website. And now I've done so: you will notice in new reviews that the ratings will feature new icons, as indicated in the reviews summary at the right. The positive and negative reviews still feature plus and minus signs, they're just now more visible icons in a square background. The problem was the "so-so" tilde; no such character exists in FontAwesome at this time. So I had to compromise and choose a new character; from now on, "so-so" reviews will feature a question mark symbol in a circle (oddly, FA features no squared question mark icon). I think this is a good choice, as the question mark represents just as well as the squiggle the indeterminate nature of the "so-so" review.

Old reviews will eventually be updated with the new icons look, as I get time and gumption to do so. (It can be a tedious process going through all those reviews--particularly in really long posts, like the 'S' Reel Reviews.)

That goes for movies. For Recently Read (book) reviews, I'm still trying to figure out whether or not I want to keep the symbol system or not. Most recently book reviews have not included any symbol, as I thought it was better to let the narraitive review speak for itself. But I'm still undecided on that. And of course, it may not matter anyway, as I almost never read any books anymore (the curse of being too busy).

So that's the scoop on what's the latest with Malchats Matters. Now maybe I can get moving and actually post something meaningful soon. There's always hope, I guess.

Mobility

Once again, for the second time in three years, the Heavily Fortified Bunker has been broken down into Lego sized boxes and stored away, leaving me temporarily homeless for an undisclosed amount of time. This is an unfortunate circumstance, to be sure, but yours truly will endure. And maybe, now that the move is accomplished, I will have more time to dedicate to posting items here on my cyber-home. Selah.

Staying in Touch

Just to make it that much easier on anyone interested, I've now added a new "Follow by Email" feature to the site, in addition to the previously set up subscription options. Just type your email address in there and away you go. Never miss out on even one of these scintillating posts.

Sweet.

Tweaks

Made a couple of minor tweaks to the page. I got rid of the light borders from the posts; they represented nothing more than visual clutter, in my eyes, and didn't work with the rounded corners anyway.

I also upsized the text in the main posts, by about 25%. This should make things a little more readable.

Otherwise, everything remains the same.

Search me?

I'm bitter. As usual. And, as usual, I'm bitter because something in this world does not do the very thing it says that it is going to do. Of course.

I'm talking about this blog. One of the reasons I started porting over my old blog's movie review pages was that I wanted to have that database of movie capsules available and--wait for it--searchable, something I did not have over on my own, self-produced web space. Blogger lets you add a search box to your site, and it states somewhere in the mumbo-jumbo that with the search field, the whole web including your own blog is then searchable. Except for the part where NO, IT'S NOT. I've had several of these Reel Reviews posts on this site for quite a few weeks now, perhaps even a couple of months in the earliest cases, and I still get no results if I search for anything from this site that's in those posts, namely film titles or specific actors and such.

This is for shit. It should not take so long for the contents of this or any other blog to be searchable via this host's own functions. They're queering my deal here. And making this whole exercise nothing more than a routine of navel gazing. Unacceptable.

Resurrection, on Film (sort of)

I used to have an old personal web site, the late crescent & crossbones productions, whereon I had voluminous movie write-ups--almost every film I watched for nearly a decade--in the site's Reel Reviews section. Until now, on this blog, Reel Reviews was limited to the plain up, down, or indifferent signals (+, --, or ~, my foolproof, copyrighted system of film review notation) in the recent postings Reel Reviews box, over yonder there at the right. No descriptions offered.

Until now, that is. I've decided to port over those old c&cp Reel Reviews pages to this blog. This will mean, among other things, several super long posts covering one whole listing of movies. (The old Reel Reviews was always organized alphabetically.) I may need to break those posts in two, or three, or whatever seems appropriate. There will also be direct links to each movie's capsule review, much as I've recently done with the books I've written up for Recently Read features. I've begun with the S page--a product of the recently viewed Stagecoach--and will port over other pages as occasion permits.

Why am I doing this? Several reasons. One, I hated the idea of all that old stuff going to waste; I made a lot of effort in putting together that database of remarks about the movies I see, and I'd like to keep it viable and available, for myself if no one else. (Much of this blog functions as a journal for myself, as much as it does a window for the rest of the world to see through.) As I move those old pages over to Malchats Matters, they will not only be available and browesable, but searchable, too--a handy feature offered by Blogger.

There's also the fact that I'm trying to jump start myself through efforts like this; trying to recapture some of the gumption and momentum I used to have in my life. If it's possible to get that from engaging myself in minor pursuits like writing movie and book reviews, I'll take it.

So the next time you want to sit down in front of the tube and watch that not-so-recent movie, come to Malchats Matters for some straight dope on whether it's a good flick, worth it if you're bored, or an utter waste of time. From here on out, you'll have the answer at your fingertips.