Yep it's a fairly big task ahead of me. :-)
Not Sure - Usually belongs in the category that is referred to
elsewhere as "Drama", but which I refuse to replicate because of the
ubiquity of drama in movies.
Actually most of those have been reverse-engineered from what I
had already assigned to movies. Yeah, I do need to devise a proper
term for the Not Sures.
Task
What makes me think I can rank all movies uniquely? There are many types
or genres of movies. Does it make sense to say that a particular
comedy is worse than a particular action movie? Basically, can I compare
apples and oranges?
Yes, I can. You can too.
We do it all the time. Indeed the human brain is remarkably adept at
drawing comparisons between objects that on the surface have very little
in common. In much the same way as economists can reduce everything
to money to decide that a gas-guzzler is better than an electric car, I can also
reduce all the subtlties and nuances of two different movies into
just one factor: How good was it?
Our personal values are the scaling factors that allow us to
make statements like "The day we went sailing was better than the week
we went up the coast". The price we pay is objectivity. You aren't going
to get any objectivity in any movie review anyway, and that's why this
site is entirely valid.
Behind The Scenes
Those of you who managed to read this far are probably interested in
some technical details of how all this is put together for the Web.
Even if you aren't interested, I'm going to tell you anyway. :-)
Storage
The movie descriptions and related fields are all stored in a MS Access
personal database of mine that I started about... gee must be 3 years ago now.
There are no one-to-many relationships in the data that I'm recording,
so it was quite disappointing when I realised it was only going to map to one table.
So it's all in one table, one movie per record.
Software Development
DAO2WEB is a module that I wrote in Visual Basic for MS Access `97.
DAO2WEB is the core of this web site.
Background
For a long time I had just used (occasionally!) the standard Access
tools for exporting a table to HTML. Access does a really crappy
job of exporting to HTML - mainly because that is all it does.
It won't let you configure the output to conform to the layout of your
web site. The most you can do is put a custom header and footer on
either side of the massive table that it generates.
It was highly unsuitable for my needs.
I love reinventing the wheel. I do it all the time and in this case
I had a superb opportunity to reinvent the wheel exactly how I wanted it.
Technology
The database was already in Access and would stay there indefinitely
because Access is perfect for my movie database. (Access gets a lot of criticism,
but it's usually only criticised when some moron has used it for the wrong purpose.)
Using VBA was then an obvious choice, and the Data Access Objects library
in MS Office applications is a really cosy data access library,
if you're into that sort of thing. That's where the name comes from.
Design
The design goals were only moderately ambitious. I really only wanted
to do as much as was needed to get my movie site up and running the
way I wanted it by Christmas 2000. The planned capabilities of the DAO2WEB
translation module, which were all successfully developed, were:
- Any Access query can be turned into a small web site.
- Completely customizable web page layout that incorporates
data from fields in the query.
- Does not add any HTML tags to the resulting pages, except
those needed to reproduce plain text formatting. (line breaks, ampersands)
- Allows any output data to be within an HTML tag definition.
- Uses template pages that look just like the final page will look.
- Can create an INDEX page of the records.
Further capabilities that emerged due to my excellent design were:
- Allows both the query records and the index entries to span multiple HTML pages, without loss of linkage.
- Allows MULTIPLE index pages to reference the SAME query records.
- The main query template page is not tied up to any particular indexing method,
and thus allows the indices to be sorted differently to the main query records.
- One-to-many relationships can be exported by using an external
frame set page and then CASCADING the different group queries
in bottom-up order when calling DAO2WEB for each level of the relationship!
Not bad huh?
You can see an example DAO2WEB template here.
The Here and Now
As I write this, DAO2WEB has been the culmination of about 3 weeks of work
in my (precious) spare time at home. It's been worth it. The guts of the
site in front of you (about 16 pages) is now all regenerated in a matter
of seconds by one click of my mouse button.
And if you want to use this DAO2WEB module for yourself, then just email
me and we can start talking about money. :-)