(No, this is not an April Fool's post. I kinda forgot that that was today.)
Hello, everyone! I hope you've been enjoying 2023.
I (will no longer) apologize for not having written anything in the past few months. I need to just embrace the fact that I can't force myself to write if I'm not inspired by any particular topic. And I'm kind of lazy lol.
In other news, I recently updated my film collection to be dynamic, using some (clumsily written) JavaScript. You can now organize the list by date or by name, and you can filter out movies I recommend, or movies that I own physical copies of.
This solves a few problems I had with the old list:
- I couldn't decide if I wanted to organize the old collection by date or by name. I eventually decided on date because I thought it might be more interesting to browse, but I still wanted the option to view it by name as well. Well, now that's possible.
- The color-coding system was awkward and unintuitive for people, including me. I was constantly forgetting what color meant what, and I spent a lot of time proofreading and correcting little mistakes with how I categorized movies. I believe it is much easier to organize now.
- Maintaining it was a pain in the butt. Having to rifle through a giant document to modify and add little bits of HTML was really annoying; at some point I was tempted to just throw my hands up and get rid of the collection completely. Now, all I have to do is add a couple lines of code to a JavaScript object. Going in and modifying the status of existing movies is also much easier now.
I had to learn a lot to actually make it work, and I have no doubt that I've made some rookie mistakes that would make web devs scream. So long as it functions and isn't hideously bloated, I'm happy with how it is. Of course, if you know JavaScript and would like to give me some extra advice, feel free to do so. At the moment, it's just a hobby. Oh, and don't worry, I'm not going to abandon my minimalist(?) roots. I don't intend to include lots of JavaScript in my articles, since there's no need for that.
Would it have been possible to use scripting to make the film collection more interactive without JavaScript? ...Yes, I suppose so. Of course, that would take even more time for me to learn, and I'm not sure that it would be possible to have it come out precisely the way I want.
There are other features I might like to add later, such as the option to view precise release dates. The information is there within the JavaScript object; the "sort by date" option takes the months and days into account, but doesn't display them to the viewer. I don't imagine it would be difficult to implement, but I've done enough coding for the past 2 days (I have forgotten what the sun looks like).
Anyways, that'll be it for me for now. I hope you enjoy the new film collection!