Quips notes 28.10.04

I sometimes find it interesting to see where visitors to my movie reviews website are checking in from. A lot of online counters and trackers seem fairly invasive for my liking - both as a web content reader and provider. So, I like that the amount of info the reinvigorate site (http://das.reinvigorate.net/) offers me is minimal enough that I never know visitor specifics such as names or personal data, even if I was interested in prying into such things. However, they still offer vaguely comprehensive enough data that I do find interesting. The feature that I enjoy the most is probably the Time Zone map.



The screen capture detail that hopefully appears above shows traffic from around the globe to my site, Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips, during July 2004. Use for this info is likely fairly limited, considering the maps really aren't accurate enough to know whether or not all of the visitors noted within, say, 'Zone F' are located in the Ottawa area, or to what degree they're dispersed throughout several countries along that vertical time line. Frankly, I just like that the majority of visitors seem to be located along the expanse that includes my hometown region. Sixty-six percent of the site's total visitors, during that month, according to the basic, colour coded listing that accompanies this map.

However, what's also great to see is that there are people from other regions dropping by the site. From other parts of North America, as well as from the UK, Europe and further East. Before signing up with reinvigorate, I had no idea that people from other provinces or countries were bothering with my movie reviews website at all.



Furthermore, pulling up the same map from August 2004, reinvigorate allows me to discover how the traffic has changed by comparison. Some regions have increased, others have decreased in frequency. I don't know why that is. It's simply interesting to see. Being aware of these statistics doesn't particularly affect what subsequent content I'll use for my reviews site, though. Or, how I'll write each new critique. I really only check out the maps for fun, and am glad that reinvigorate offers this easy to use, free feature.

Thanks for checking in.

Quips notes 26.10.04

In putting together the reviews for the movies that I'd checked out recently - namely, 'Surviving Christmas', 'I Heart Huckabees', 'The Grudge', and 'Luther' - I was reminded of why it's sometimes fun to take that experience of paying the price of admission and facing the consequences of that decision beyond simply going to the movie theatre. After seeing a flick, it's fun to discover the story behind that big screen story, and how it's been elaborated upon on the web by those involved.

That's definitely true with 'I Heart Huckabees'. Four websites have been created for it, outside of the usual one that studios will normally cobble together to promote their latest releases. In this case, each separate site represents and reflects the over-all personality of the three main organizations and one of the supporting characters featured in that picture. The results are mixed, but enjoyable. Here are the links:

http://www.huckabees.com
http://www.jaffeandjaffe.com
http://www.open-spaces.org
http://tommycorn.blogspot.com

Usually, the sites that are put together by the studios are so heavily bloated with Flash animation that I can't really be bothered to invest time trying to find out what's there, let alone look for useful info that might work in the movie review I plan to write. That's pretty well what ended up happening with 'Luther'. I gave up waiting for useful things to transpire shortly after it started loading a blank page with a lot more blankness and nothing else. Sending me back to checking around through a couple of my favourite reference websites for info. Here are the links, including one found through Wikipedia that's relevent and was very useful:

http://www.google.ca/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/web/ninetyfive.html

Of course, the website I usually rely on the most for general info is still The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/). It's heavily commercialized, but it's a great source for finding most character names, the production crew names and bios, and info about the actors and related movies that I may decide to cite while writing each review. Nothing completely replaces taking notes during the screening itself, but this site is a close second to that for my purposes.

Thanks for checking in.

A blog is born

Hello. It's funny that I've thought about putting one of these together for a while - making an attempt with a kind of homemade blog about a year or so ago, when my (second) home computer's mother board was fried as a result of the province-wide power blackout, to keep my reviews site vaguely alive while dealing with that - but, actually going ahead and creating a proper one has just happened now. While I was checking out background info for a movie, coincidentally. Discovering that it's a lot easier to set up than I'd originally expected. Go figure.

So, the official Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips blog is now born.

Hopefully, this will grow into a source for useful peripheral content relating to my movie reviews website: Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips. Such as developments in how the movies are normally reviewed, containing info on what's happening with the site itself. Perhaps also including anecdotal stories that I'll definitely try to keep relevent to previewing and reviewing the movies in general. I don't intend this blog to become my personal diary. Probably because I don't really find that sort of thing particularly interesting, personally. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks for checking in.