Preview posts always had problems for not giving enough information or resorting to “chartfag” charts that become outdated when a stream of new information comes in, giving the readers not enough info on when the series will start, how long, what genre and so on. This leads people writing preview posts without enough information and just making noise for the sake of it.
There is a solution. If you familiar with Melative as I discussed a while back. The advantage of Melative that Melative has open APIs and a open Wiki format where the info can be edited by editors (and users can create their own versions of their pages) and add up to date information. Lime is what the whole thing is based on, well at least for the open Wiki part. I have suggested a WordPress plugin where a user just enters the URL to the title page on Melative (in a certain format) and it would be replaced with the up to date information that is currently in the database that includes the picture, any context information (date of when the series will start, how many episodes, genres, etc.), links to other resources and of course the description. This approach is a lot more informative and takes the guess work on researching information on that title. This is how I done my “Upcoming Anime” page.
The usage is really simple. Copy the link to the title and put it in this format. For example
It should look like this:
With it’s advantages, there are some disadvantages. One of them is that the “melative-item” plugin will not work on wordpress.com or any other blog software that isn’t a self hosted WordPress. This is because WordPress.com does not allow third party themes and plugins. Second, this WordPress plugin is still in development and not complete yet. Although the chances of it malfunctioning is low, the plugin can malfunction or do funny stuff, but it will not affect anything in the WordPress database.
If you interested, you can download the plugin here. To install, just unzip, upload the melative-item folder to your WordPress Plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins) and use the format I demonstrated above to show the information from Melative in your posts or pages. If you have any issues, report them on IRC, #melative on freenode. Also, the plugin will be available on wordpress.org in the future, so keep a lookout.
And this plugin pretty much made chartfag charts obsolete… for most bloggers. Also note that a melative account isn’t necessarily required to use the plugin, although you should take part in it and ditch services like MyAnimeList.
Well this will make things much easier. Although I don’t think Chartfag charts will become obsolete. People want everything in one gulp/page/chart.
.-= Seinime´s last blog ..Colorblind Spring Season =-.
Granted that I’m the one who brought this topic up, but I fail to see the problem this plugin solves beyond being a neat trick. I think the Melative data is potentially useful, but having a pre-fab drop-in template doesn’t seem like something people would adopt because it’d be redundant. If every blog started having the same individual drop-in templated entries for anime, what would be the point? Why would it be any better than Chartfag? Do you imagine that people will be like “Now I’m going to talk about anime . Here’s the basic data: “? That’s pretty much just as lazy as copying chartfag, while being a less comprehensive overview at the same time.
I suppose the advantage is that it’s dynamic and community-editable, but that also poses a problem for blogs in that the words they write in their post (i.e. their own “value-add”) may be related to the data they see at the time. So when future people visit the post that references this melative data, the data may have changed so causing the post content to not make any sense. For example, Clueless Blogger X posts their Spring preview in Early January and makes reference to a show with little-to-no info and makes some inane comment like “little is known about this show or its production”. Someone visits that page just before the season actually starts, and now the Melative data shows a plethora of data while the user’s post content stays the same. Having this sort of drop-in dynamic content mixed in with static time-sensitive blog posts just doesn’t make much sense. It only makes sense if you’re going to make a special page just for anime info, but do we all need to be anime encyclopedias?
(Plus, the plug-in fails to get its own link correct in the anime’s title. Good job. ^^; )
I suppose what could be useful if a plugin like this could take care of all the complicated API stuff behind the scenes and give bloggers an easy way to extract the data they want without having to know any programming. But I don’t think people will find it very user-friendly if they have to learn XSLT to customize it. ^^;
Anyway, I do actually appreciate that a lot of work went into this plug-in, but I still wonder if we’re clear about what problem we’re trying to solve. Personally speaking, my main problem with season previews isn’t that people don’t have up-to-date information, it’s that people generally fail to provide any useful *insight*. Just making it easier for people to copy-paste their research doesn’t really solve anything from that angle. And if you look at this as a replacement for chartfag, you would need to develop something that is as comprehensive and “at-a-glance” as what chartfag offers, as Seinime alluded to above. So ultimately, to be blunt, I don’t see something like this gathering much traction. It’s a neat proof-of-concept, but I don’t clearly see the problem it’s solving.
.-= relentlessflame´s last blog ..A Guide to using Tenso: Purchasing directly from Japanese online stores =-.
@relentlessflame: LOL… I noticed that it fails to get the link to the title… Ryan needs to fix that…
Anyways, Well, there isn’t much with preview posts besides posting first impressions. Perhaps bloggers start creating a dedicated page for previews, it will probably reduce the need for a preview posts. Preview posts should really be done two or three weeks before the Winter season ends so that readers won’t be distracted on the next “big thing.”
However, if the creator of chartfag is concerned with up to date information, he could of use PHP to grab the infos from Melative using the APIs and then generate a new image based on that or even better. A chart where it uses Adobe Flash where the user can interact with it. When a user click on the title, a popup within the flash will tell additional information such as episode count, dates, genres, description, resources and other facts. Well, the possibilities are endless, but if users just going to just slap the melative-links and not post any thoughts, first impressions or opinions, I think that is where we are going to have a problem.
Follow-up: I see what you’ve done on your Upcoming Anime page, and understand at least your use of the function — as a sort of referential extension to your blog on a separate page. That at least makes some sense in terms of solving the time-sensitivity problem I alluded to above. I also note what Ryan A posted on my comments that was similar to this, but did it in a hover-over effect (his example is here: http://aloedream.animeblogger.net/autumn-2009).
So if you combine the two concepts maybe there’s something to this that I hadn’t considered before, but I still wonder about it. Imagine you had a hook into WordPress such that the first time you mention any anime title, it would automatically make that a link and hovering over that link would show the melative templated info similar to the data example above (see also Ryan’s example). The only problem is that it could sort of seem like an ad, but it has the advantage of providing info and context to people as part of your regular blog posts. So if you’re discussing Sora no Woto (or whatever), the info and links would be available to readers without having to go dig for it. I can sort imagine that providing a potential value add to people, and the technology behind-the-scenes would be similar to this plugin.
I’m not really sure how people would react to something like that, but I at least wanted to throw that out there as a sidebar to my earlier sort of “why would anyone need this?” comment. Maybe there is a use after all if we think outside the box.
@Relentlessflame
Nice point. I can see this as being a “random anime of this season preview” on the sidebar, yet I can also see this as an introduction to when someone first discusses about the anime or perhaps a summary when people view the category page with the corresponding posts listed. Although it might seem easier to use this and copypasta the info, IMHO I prefer a rather simplistic approach and a chart works just fine. A preview, though, requires more opinions and thoughts about the matter rather than generic information, I guess.
…I need to become a less boring blogger.
Okay
The main thing this does is convert html comments into html data. First by pulling the right API xml, then by applying an XSL template. The pulled data is cached on the blog, but it’s also configurable.
@relentlessflame
If every blog started having the same individual drop-in templated entries for anime, what would be the point?
Template/output is customizable in the XSL.
Someone visits that page just before the season actually starts, and now the Melative data shows a plethora of data while the user’s post content stays the same.
Possibly an option would be to have a cache-time in the html comment, so that the data doesn’t change.
While this can be used for season previews, I don’t think it should be widely used without customization.
do we all need to be anime encyclopedias?
If a blogger wishes to have their ‘go-to page’ which is customized to what they want to see and how they want to see it, then why not? Personally, I like having a season page on my own blog because I know exactly where to go and what it’s going to look like. If others like the format and like to visit, then I guess that’s fine, but not required. The overhead isn’t that heavy.
I don’t think people will find it very user-friendly if they have to learn XSLT to customize it. ^^;
Semi-true. If they want to really hack the data, then basic XSL is needed, but for the most part, making the output look a certain way is no different than HTML.
I do actually appreciate that a lot of work went into this plug-in, but I still wonder if we’re clear about what problem we’re trying to solve.
You’d be surprised that this was a plugin from last Sept/Oct, and it was an hour’s worth of mods (mostly xsl) to make it work with the page data; previous stuff allowed user to display their library, title activity via the microblog, or a single micro-update. Even the original plugin was only a couple hours worth of work.
This doesn’t solve the problem of people posting mundane season previews, definitely not. It wasn’t trying to solve that issue anyway. chik just mentioned the idea to me, and I went ahead and added the functionality to the existing plugin. Now his perspective on it might be that this can replace chartfag, etc, but rather than that I’d like to see chartfag use the data and create dynamic images from it… I’m not going to do the work to get that done.
Btw, in the current plugin isn’t that great for season preview stuff because it isn’t aggregating a search query. An entire season can be retrieved through the API, which is where I’d see chartfag being able to use it. The search response isn’t part of the plugin yet. Example search.
.-= Ryan A´s last blog ..Getting to Know Buzz =-.
@Seinime rather than replace chartfag, power chartfag. That’s the move I’d be up for. It’s not that difficult to create a chart out of the data, with standard styling and all (and as a jpeg).
I like the sidebar idea, and more specifically possibly interactive, where minimal info is shown, and clicking does some nifty sliding or whatever to load more infos.
@relentlessflame pt II
Yes, the hover box is what I like, although I think it can be less ‘in your face popup’ maybe have an icon beside the link that brings up some customized/minimal info, perhaps not even the description.
The other side of this is that library information is included with the page data. So the plugin can offer a glimpse at how many users have the title in their library, the overall approval rating, number of favorites, popularity, rank, etc.
People are hinged on other cataloging/scrobbling sites, so of course I want to offer utility that unhinges them and makes it attractive to use the engine either on-site or via federation. Of course, they very much dislike this idea, or perhaps have huge bias against melative because ‘Ryan A’ is the one pushing it. More than anything, I don’t think the average user realizes the ability built into the api atm; it’s not apparent that I basically never use a browser with the site, but rather scrobble/microblog stuff straight from mplayer, mpd, quod libet, xchat, echofon, seesmic, or whatever other way I want to interface the site.
For the one doing most of the coding, I use the site maybe 3% of the time, all other times, I let apps/clients play with the api…. and that’s how I like to keep it.
.-= Ryan A´s last blog ..Getting to Know Buzz =-.