Category Archives: Development

Project Wonderful

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So I’ve gotten around to trying a new ad system: Project Wonderful. I first heard about it on Real Life Comics and decided to look into it. Also the fact that there was some way to get ads into my RSS feeds sounded interesting. I haven’t looked too deep into that yet, but it looks like due to the fact they have code for both <script> and <noscript>, the noscript part can be activated on RSS feeds, so if I inject the code directly into the feed php files, it should theoretically work.

I found many of AdBrite’s flash animation ads to be really annoying, so it wasn’t that difficult a decision to leave them. I still have the footer on AdBrite to compare it against the header which is now using Project Wonderful.

Some cool things about Project Wonderful include:

  • A lot of tweaks (i.e. banner size, text/graphical ads, enable/disable animation, open in new/same window, colors, audience catering, etc.)
  • Ad code that doesn’t necessary need to run JavaScript, so you can place it on RSS feeds.
  • Nice and helpful customer support. Sent an email, got a reply 5 minutes later not with an automated response or someone who doesn’t even bother reading my email, but an actual human telling what I had to do.
  • Once you’re approved, you can post ads on any site that you own. You don’t have to manually request for approval for additional sites.

I also heard about OpenX from my DreamHost newsletter (don’t worry, this site isn’t hosted on DreamHost). I’m not exactly sure how it works, but it sounds like another interesting ad server. If anyone knows about OpenX, please feel free to drop us a line telling us about it. Much appreciated.

Advertisements

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It’s been awhile since I posted about any developments on this site. Work has kept me quite busy.

I’ve been fooling around with ads, as you probably have noticed (unless of course you use AdBlocker). Anyway, I still don’t quite like the layout nor the annoying flashing gif animations. I’ll be experimenting with text only ads and see how they fare. Before you ask me why I’ve opted for AdBrite and not Google Adsense, lets just say that Google Adsense doesn’t like this site for some reason, as my application was rejected without any explanation.

The “All Trailers” link has been moved from the bottom of the index pages to the top to make it more discoverable.

I’ve also received many requests to add a search engine for this site. As always, you were able to search for trailers using the built-in WordPress search engine. I do have plans to write one up and even supporting auto-complete. However for now, I just added a search box in the upper right hand corner that does an in-site search of hd-trailers.net via Google.

Also, there has been a request to label trailers with genre tags, which I’ve begun to. I’ve just been copying genre information from IMDb and adding them to the category list.

Trailer Sorting (Finding Newest Trailer)

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I’ve received a few requests to add a time stamp next to the trailers so it’ll be easy to find out which trailers are new. It’s on my to do list, but unfortunately I’ve been pretty busy with work lately and haven’t had much time to work on the site. I did add some change to sort by trailer name (i.e. Teaser, Trailer, etc.) so at least that is not random anymore.

As for finding out which trailers are the newest, I’ve suggested those who’ve emailed us to click on the little blue HD icon near the bottom which will return all the blog entries with the movie title in it. It’s sorted in reverse post order, so it help in determining which trailer is the newest.

Yahoo! Images Were Sad

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The Yahoo! movie images were sad, since once there was an available Apple movie image, the code would opt to use that instead. Therefore I’ve decided to switch them off, where odd # days would use Apple images and even # days would use Yahoo! images.

Main Link added

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I’ve hacked together and added an automatically generated Main Link on every Movie Trailer post on the blog as well as on the Atom/RSS2 feeds. So instead of going to the blog, you can go directly to the main user interface or share out the link with friends.

There is a problem however. Due to the fact the main pages are automatically generated, certain pages are often delayed and not available when the blog entry is created. Therefore, I’ve added a little disclaimer: may not be up. I may decide to do some check later to see if the main trailer page is up.

I’ve also fixed up the trailer not found page and now it’ll redirect you back to the homepage.

Incorrect Titles

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Recently I made a change attempting to make all my pages Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and one of the problems I was facing was that strings I read off of Yahoo! or Apple aren’t always correctly encoded. Therefore I had a simple hacked which called html_entity_decode() followed by htmlentities(), hoping to fix issues.

However, while browsing the pages today, I noticed the title was completely broken when it had special characters such as the apostrophe. Looking closer at the code, it appeared to default to the ISO-8859-1 character set, when what I really wanted was the UTF-8 character set.

Adding that parameter to the method appears to have fixed it. If you guys see anymore problems, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

Informational Links

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I’ve updated the main trailer pages to now include informational links near the bottom, above the social networking links. It currently has links to:

  • HD-Trailers.net Blog
  • Amazon.com
  • Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
  • Rotten Tomatoes
  • Yahoo! Movies
  • Internet Movie Poster Awards (IMP Awards)

They’re basically linked to their individual search engines, but the results tend to be useful.

If you have suggestions on what other informational links to add, please feel free to leave a comment.

I’ve also added poster switching ability. Previously if there’s a movie poster from both Apple and Yahoo!, I only display the Apple one. I felt the Yahoo! poster might get lonely. Therefore if a trailer has 2 posters, when you hover the mouse above the poster image, it’ll get switched to the secondary poster.

New Changes to Site

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If you haven’t noticed yet, I’ve been making changes to the main site over the last few days.

First, I’ve gotten rid of the LightBox (SubModal) and made each trailer an individual page with it’s own header and links. I did this due to several factors. First, depending on the description, it was hard to judge how big to make the modal window. Then there was the fact that people would share links directly to the individual trailers page (which is expected) and it’s hard to discover how to get back to the main site to see more trailers. The experience just wasn’t ideal.

Next I’ve removed the Digg scripts from both the main indices (plural of index) as well as the individual trailer pages and gone with a simpler link sharing code I borrowed from Sociable. You’ll notice that the blog also has this feature enabled. Sociable is a WordPress plug-in, but I just borrowed the code and used it on the main page. I may implement my own voting system later in the future, but for now, that’ll remain on my TO-DO list.

Then there was the navigational changes. First I now have giant left and right arrows for navigating between index pages, while removing the navigation links that used to be below the trailer images. Next, on every individual trailer page, you’ll see links to the next and previous trailers, so you can continue browsing without having to go back to the index. At first I wanted to do arrows on these pages as well, but I also wanted to provide some visual hint to what the next trailer is. I haven’t found a good way to merge an arrow with the trailer image yet, but when I do, you’ll see it.

You’ll also notice the next/previous links on the individual trailer pages to be stationary. The reasoning for this is that if I just want to quickly go through trailers, I won’t have to move my mouse to where the next link is to continue. I’ve always hated sites that didn’t have a stationary next/previous links.

I also changed around how the tables were laid out. Apparently the <tr> no longer supports the height attribute and for some reason the cell heights are automatically assigned. I was able to hack it in Firefox by creating a giant cell that pushes things up, but IE7 just didn’t like whatever I threw at it. Now I’ve just merged the title and descriptions into 1 giant cell so I won’t hit this weird problem.

More changes will come later as I find some more free time.

Removed Digg on Index Pages

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I’ve got fed up with how slow the pages were loading when it’s trying to contact Digg to get what the current Digg score is, so I decided to remove it from the index pages. Things I’m also planning to add or change include:

  • Search Engine
  • Sort by Name
  • Sort by Score
  • Inclusion of other link sharing sites
  • Caching of Digg score
  • Converting the individual Sub-Modal/Lightbox pages into main pages
  • Links to IMDb, Amazon, Blog, etc.

Those are not sorted in order of priority, and will probably be implemented when I feel like it.

Revamping of Urls

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I’ve been playing with PHP and JavaScript to see if I can get the trailer frame to automatically pop up and ended with something like this: Trailer Popup.

At first I wanted to automatically detect if the parent frame was the HD Trailers index page, and if it wasn’t, to load the index page first, then display the trailer frame. There were some difficulties in doing this as most of my processing is done on server side and there really isn’t a way for PHP to know how the frames are structured on the client side. I could do it with client side code (JavaScript), but then I realized it’ll cause problems with the search engines when they’re indexing my pages. I had a working prototype of this and played with it for awhile.

I then tried passing in another get parameter to my index pages, but that didn’t work out too well due to the fact the index pages are cached and that I had wanted to avoid loading the big trailer list every time.

Finally, I created a whole new page for it: view.php and it worked out pretty well. I then realized that all my Digg URLs would have to change, causing a big reset to ‘0’.

I contemplated for a bit, and reverted the work. Looks like I’ll have to give this some more thought.