Listal beta test

I've uploaded a new version of Listal I have been working on to :

beta .listal.com

Lot of stuff missing and probably many bugs but I wanted to share and get feedback on it (the stuff that works anyway ;) )

BTW I haven't tested that much in IE so there may be a few problems with that.

It's looking good.

On the Actor/Artist/Author/Director pages, besides just having pictures and videos... will there be anything else? Like a description?

And might I suggest rearranging the Movie/TV/DVD/Music/Books/Games home? Maybe putting the 'custom lists' to the top of the page, and 'My Actors And My Actress & My Directors' at the bottom?

Instead of 'Top 3 rated' items, either you could make it more or have next to it, 'Bottom 3 rated'


Anyway,
I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining :)

wow, thanks Tom!

First Page - I love the more colourful touchup to the left panels, except the Groups panel is now gradient blue, which clashes a bit with the blue HTML links of the groups. Its a different shade of blue, but a bit tricky on the eyes.

Also, the gradiency on the blue is off or broken, compared to the other two gradient panels above it. Maybe its just my box? (XP SP1, Firefox 1.5). Notice the sharp blue edge near the word 'listal development' ?
www.bwde.com/files/listal1.jpg

Edit Profile page: What happened to all the small icons next to the field boxes? You know, the globe icon next to country field, the little picture fram icon next to picture. It gave the page a bit of life and colour before.

general comment: Its nice you added a web icon (noticeable when bookmarked, or viewing in tab mode in Firefox). I like adding bookmarks to my Firefox and renaming then to no text so only icon is visible in the toolbar. But what exactly is 'DG' icon meant to represent? I think a nice silver "L" in a black box icon would be neat.

Movie Page: I love the new look, with the actors and directors images, but four things I would change/tweak.

1. Why only 3 top rated movies? There seems to be tons of room across top, so why not top 10 (1 horizontal row) or top 20 (2 horizontal rows).

2. I don't like how tag cloud got trucated so heavily. I lot of my tags are now gone, I think its cutoff at like 5 or 6 tags for me coz I tagged a lot, so anything with just one or 2 tags is gone. I understand keeping it small, but at least fill up the entire right panel all the way down so its flush level with the last row of directors. Or maybe reduce size of biggest font tags, so more items would fit. And also have a link to (View all tags), which would show full page of all your tags in cloud format. I do want even the minor tags visible, if possible. I know space is limited, but option for full page tag cloud, even as a pop-up window, would be nice for power searches.

3. It would be nice to give the 'tag cloud' and the 'custom list' some sort of colourful background/frame, like they used to have.

4. By adding say 10 or more lists, that will drag page down and down. What about show past 5 or 6 lists only, and add 'View All' option for lists?

p.s. I noticed the blue gradient looks good on this page, vs the one on main profile page.

p.s. i'm not ranting or antyhing like that. this is all constructive critisism on the beta. Overall, i like the next direction its going into.

You've been quite busy, Tom. awesome work.

bug alert: All the pages (movies, dvd, etc..), the Recommended and Add buttons link to Recommended and Add for TV section, not for their respective categories.

awesomeness alert: Wow! Grid view is now bigger thumbnails than ever. Awesome! It really puts all those high-res movie posters i uploaded to good use. LOL.

Movie page: To better fill out the movie page, why not add the picture of director, and then pictures of all the actors/actresses too, instead of text links? And any thoughts on adding plot line/review on the left side of movie page, say plot outline summary taken from IMDB database? DVD collections have Amazon reviews, but movies pages are quite empty.

navigation comment: I like how you eliminated the 2nd row (watched, to watch, popular, add, recommended) and added them to the left side. Double row got a bit confusing. But now, its hard to find those items as they're plain text links. How about making them as buttons, or make them a bit more prominent and adding icons next to them (like the + for add, the 'heart' for recommended, and the 'globe' for popular).

ok, i'll get back to work now. I'll check it more out tonight.

Tom, check this issue out:

www.bwde.com/files/listal2.jpg

If actor images are uploaded that aren't near perfect squares, it gets truncated to become a square thumbnail. But depending on the picture, it can have the following effect.

I uploaded ben stiller picture, and it looks like he's peaking over a fence. lol. same thing for Will Ferrel and Johnny Depp, they both have their chins cut off.

Thanks for the posts, I will spend today and the weekend fixing all the bugs, I will update here when I've completed them.

I love the new grid view as well, with the display limit set to 21 it works nicely with my resolution.

"say plot outline summary taken from IMDB database"

Im not sure if that would be allowed, I take the credits and title but I consider this to be fair use (since you can't really copyright movie credits)

"If actor images are uploaded that aren't near perfect squares, it gets truncated to become a square thumbnail. But depending on the picture, it can have the following effect."

Maybe i could make them a little longer, but I kind of like the look of the square images, I will think about it...

I love the square thumbs too, and i think you should keep that. But maybe allow to set 'primary image', so if we put an image that looks wrong (like Ben Stiller), we can try another one and set that as primary.

It works best with near-square images, and also in vertical iamges where the head of actor is fully in upper half of image (image of actor from chest up). If an image is vertical, but is only a crop of actor's close-up of his face, that's when that happens. But allowing to set primary image would fix that. The community would pitch in and fix any weird thumbnails.

:::Bug Alert:::
When I click 'Add' when in the Movies/DVDs/Books/Music/Games home page, it takes me to 'Add Products for TV' instead.

"And might I suggest rearranging the Movie/TV/DVD/Music/Books/Games home? Maybe putting the 'custom lists' to the top of the page, and 'My Actors And My Actress & My Directors' at the bottom?"

The problem is there are unlimited number of custom lists, although I could only display the last 5 updated ones.

":::Bug Alert:::
When I click 'Add' when in the Movies/DVDs/Books/Music/Games home page, it takes me to 'Add Products for TV' instead."

Fixed

in regards to the actor thumbnail images, and keeping them square-sized (looks awesome that way), but rather than allow 'set as primary' which might get into a bit of tug of war, say some want bill murray as young actor, and others as old man he is now.

Well what if there was 5-star rating for each picture uploaded for actors/actresses, and the pictures would show up in top rating order, and the most popular image would default as primary thumbnail?

And in addition to 5 star rating, also add 'red flag' or 'flag as innaproriate' or something along that line, which would be treated as a negative mark against the photo, and once it passes a certain threshold, say 5 or 10 users mark it as negative, it would be deleted.

This would help filter out spam, or smut, or nipple slip shots of celebrities, or also incorrect images (adding bill murray to eddie murphy's profile, for example).

I think it will be necessary to keep the community clean and self-policed by the community against abusers and spammers, and though its a good community right now, its best to plan ahead for the bad apples that might want to abuse the upload policy.

Instead of a 5-star rating for the pictures, what about just a vote 'Yes' or 'No' for each picture?
The one with the most 'Yes' votes is the one used. (one vote per person)

You might also look at www.last.fm and how they do their voting for pictures of artists.

Good point, Manling. 5-star per photo is a bit excessive info to track (although, perhaps an overall rating for each actor/actress/director might be handy... see top rated actors, and see the worst actors, based on what community feels. a sort of IMDB like rating of their acting talents. LOL)

But wording of yes/no is a bit wrong too. People might not know what the purpose of that is.

I'll take a look at last.fm's voting.

Ok, I now see the new black/green/red webicon, so that's neat. Its easily recognizable now in my Firefox toolbar.

Also, I noticed 'My Tags' on left panel, which opens up full page of all the tags I used. That's what I was looking for, but maybe if you added a direct link to 'View All Tags' next to the truncated tag cloud on movie page, that might save a bit of navigation confusion.

bug:

beta.listal.com/productimages/movies/41154

On the screen where you upload images, it doesnt work on the beta site. It just takes you back to the movies page and doesnt upload anything.

bug:

On movie listings page (I didnt try it on other categories, but it might be the same), whenever a change is initiated by changing the Display or Limit, the screen margins get a lot wider, throwing the movie info and thumbnails overtop the gray right margin, and sometimes even stretching so much that it adds a horizontal scrollbar to my Firefox window.

update on that last bug: If it helps to narrow it down, the table widening seems to happen only when i click movies, and then one of the tags, and then try to change display or change limit of what's shown. In Movies Watched, or Want to Watch list, the table stays fixed width, no matter what the Display or Limit are changed to. So it might be that new green panel which allows multi-tagging to be causing this table widening?

It's harder to find an artist\actor\director with this new beta. With the old version, you just had to go to the home page, look for them, and then click to find all the movies\albums that they've done.

Maybe, if there were more than 18 on each page of the "My Actor\artist\director's List" that would solve the solution. But otherwise, I have to go hunting through the pages for the actor I want to see how many movies they've played in.

I'm not really complaining, just voicing the difficulties I've had with the new version.

I assume by homepage you mean the movie/tv/book homes?

You have to click on '(7 items)' for example to get the list of your items, I might change this though.

Maybe I could include a page which just lists all the actors alphabetically and/or I could include a drop down which lists them all as well.

I think WyrmSlayer was saying he misses the tag cloud function of previous version. The tag cloud showed close to 50 or so actors, while new version shows top 10 actors and top 10 directors (i like how compact it is) but when you click on View All, it then shows all pages, but only 18 per page. If that area was customizable, say default to 18, but users can set it to 10 rows (6 per row, that's 66 actors displayed on first page), it would make it easier to find the person you're looking for.

But aside from having more thumbs per page, i love having thumbnails for actors/actresses. I suck at remembering names of my favorite actors, but I see their face, and then my mind clicks, 'oh yeah, its the guy who played the cyborg in Aliens!'. :)