10th
The new home page
It’s been an awful long time coming but the home page redesign is finally up! I wanted to get images into the design from the very beginning but I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of having to wrestle an assortment of APIs. The whole process actually turned out to be remarkably easy. At the moment I’m using Last.fm for album covers, MoviePosterDB for film posters and Flickr for everything else.
I’ve also finally taken the time to attempt an explanation of what Out of Five is actually for. I’m still not happy with it but it’s a damned sight better than it was before:
Out of Five is a little service that lets you review the things you’d like to remember or recommend - gigs, movies, restaurants and so on - from the bus home, your sofa or wherever you happen to find yourself at the time.
Most obviously, I’ve rethought the layout for individual reviewed things. I wanted to try and present a summary of the sentiment around each thing and give a little extra help for people wanting to join in. I seem to remember reading somewhere that when Alexander Graham Bell was trying to push the telephone into the mainstream he chose to install his new devices in public places - cafes, restaurants, bars etc. His strategy was to show (likeminded) people how to use phones instead of telling them. @oo5 is hardly rocket science but it’s an odd way to carry out the act of reviewing and I don’t think I’d really put enough thought into helping people along back when I first started the project. Anyway, that’s what the stuff over on the right hand side is: an example review and a ready made tweet for people to copy and paste.
I still need to push some of the changes deeper into the site but for the time being, let me know what you think…
