2StateReviews – Site Redesign?

Not a lot has happened with 2StateReviews (the movie review website I co-developed with James Lloyd) since it’s initial burst of development while I was between jobs, and James was also able to find time to work on it. For a first stab it’s not bad and I’m generally amazed that we don’t actually need to do anything to manage the site on a day to day basis.

However, it was a first stab and there are definitely things we can do to improve it. One of those would be improvement of the site design. In it’s current state the content and layout are more or less the same thing. We started the project with a bundle of enthusiam, but no actual decisions on how we were going to make it happen or what we wanted it to look like, so it’s basically evolved into it’s current design.

Seperating content from layout will mean we can steer clear of the backend development stuff, and play with the look and feel of the site without the risk of breaking the code. Which happens quite a lot – neither myself or James come from a formal development background. The other thing we’ll probably do it clean up the code, and chuck in a few more features. I’ve had a few more ideas about what we can do with it since we started development, so the future of the site could be interesting.

All this is dependant on time, and weather – so all this probably won’t happen until the days start getting dreary again. Hey, it’s sunny in England right now!

Nice laptop, crazy accent

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/14/video_asus_seashell_eee_1008ha/

Must… not… buy… netbook…

I hate Facebook

I hate Facebook, so rather than putting up with it I have now closed my Facebook account. This seems initially rather drastic, although it tells me I can reopen it in exactly the same state, which is kinda like the same as leaving it open and not using it, but nevermind. I never got massively into running through 25 questions about myself, or looking through other people’s photos, or being a fan of anything in particular which didn’t seem to make any difference either way.

The only highlight of Facebook was keeping track of friend updates, which Twitter has taken over in a faster and less annoying way. The really annoying part of Facebook was people inviting you to stuff in it, not finding out because I never logged in, and finding out at the last minute. So for now, people will have to resort to emailing, twittering, google talking, sms’ing, or FSM forbid, calling me.

2StateReviews Beta

It’s still being built, but the doors are open – 2StateReviews has been raised to beta release! This makes no actual difference, but we did need to search/replace alpha to beta.

As well as starting to look like a website and being possibly the quickest way to find out if a movie is worth seeing or not, it’s becoming feature packed. Exciting new features added only this week include:

• Twitter Integration – Tweets when you vote on a recent movie
• Wordpress Support – Wordpress Plugin is now available to report the latest vote you submitted
• Rework of Actor Rating – It’s so complicated I can’t begin to explain
• RSS Feed – Keep track of who has been voting for what
• Layout – Site design has been improved dramatically with AJAX voting and updates
• Other Stuff – Lots of fixes have been sorted out behind the scenes, mostly to help us keep things up to date with a full CMS system which is nearly there.

Register. Vote. Fun. Give it a go.