Tag Archives: date

Added Post Date and File Size to Trailers

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2 of the most requested features (trailer post date and trailer file size) have been implemented and is live. Unfortunately, previously I’ve only kept track of the latest date from a particular source, so you’ll notice that all Yahoo! or Apple trailers have the same post date for the same movie. However, moving forward, new trailers should have the correct published dates.

File size was actually a lot simpler (though not as reliable) than I originally imagined. I’m currently just making a HEAD request which returns a set of info including the Content-Length without having to download the whole file to find out. However, once in awhile, the Content-Length that is returned is incorrect or obviously not true.

As I’ve tweeted earlier, I made some changes hopefully that’ll improve performance. I’ve added expiration/cache-control that I learnt from .htaccess File and mod_rewrite examples. I also found out I wasn’t sending the correct headers (which included last modified time and etags), which I’ve fixed.

Another change I’ve made was to default the All Trailers catalog index to display text instead of movie posters. Since most people hit the default page, this should decrease a lot of server hits which used to download several hundred poster images per load.

I’ve also added a 3rd source to our main catalog: Moviefone

As always, comments are welcomed. If you see any issues, we’d like to hear about them too. 😀

Index All Text Mode with Sort!

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One of our biggest requests we received was to be able to sort the trailers in our catalog, along with also displaying the actual movie title with the poster. The reason why we didn’t display the movie title was more of a design decision. Movie titles can be very long and that we would either have to increase the area size for the movie title or truncate it, neither which was desirable.

We initially wanted a similar feel to Windows Media Center where they just have posters/thumbnails and if you selected the image, it would show you the title and more information. Due to time constraints, this is currently implemented by showing alternative text when you hover your mouse over the poster.

I’ve been working on the the text mode for a few non-consecutive weekends already. I had actually gotten text mode working a few weeks earlier, but it was very simple and was just a giant list of all the movie titles. This weekend, I spent making it usable and not repulsive. The full design still has a long way to go.

Along with text mode, I’ve also been working on sorting. Sorting was actually quite simple to implement, though I won’t bore you with the details. By default I sort by trailer posted date, but now I allow sorting by movie title. Some work that I need to do around this area is group them alphabetically (by their first letter), ignore “The” if a movie title begins with it, and few other small things here and there.

With that said, enjoy:
Index All – Poster mode sorted by date
Index All – Poster mode sorted by title
Index All – Text mode sorted by date
Index All – Text mode sorted by title

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.