Preview posts always had problems for not giving enough information or resorting to “chartfag” charts that become outdated when a stream of new information comes in, giving the readers not enough info on when the series will start, how long, what genre and so on.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.