Ok, this is me being mercenary, take it or leave it. There was a request to add spellcheck to IS in the gallery today. Here’s my offer, $200 in tips earmarked for this purpose to my paypal account, and it’ll happen not long after. We’re already at $50 earmarked for that purpose (I’ll update this amount daily as it changes), so only another $150 and we’re there.

Yes, if you’re running Firefox 2.0 and some other browsers, you probably get spellcheck for free. Yeah, this is a little like guilting you into it, but well, this request feels like work, so I’m treating it as such. If you’ve made a previous donation that didn’t go towards something and would like to see spellcheck, lemme know. If you have another feature you’d like added, contact me before tipping, I’ll let you know how much it’ll take to make it happen.

As for other improvements like logins, they’ll come eventually, I just haven’t been in a feature adding mode lately. So there.

I’m thinking of finally letting people protect their handles on Inventing Situations, but would like to get some feedback and give some warning before I throw the switch. It would probably work thusly: if you’ve registered a handle at sector7g-zz9 then you’d have to be logged on to use that handle on IS (even if you only registered it for use on Wasting Precious Time or the movie catalog). The submit caption form would include a password field so you could log on and submit a caption in a single swoop. But if you haven’t registered, then you’d be able to just leave the password blank and keep capping as always. In the past I’ve waffled and given reasons not to do this, but I’m starting to think it’s finally time to go ahead with it.

To my mind, here are the major pros and cons of my proposed system.
Pros:

• Allows people to protect themselves against password theft (which I still think is a very rare occurrence).
• If done properly, should be low impact. Little to no effect on those who choose not to use it, and just an occasional password entry for those who do use it.
• Will allow for addition of things like capperwiki profile links on people’s captions.

Cons:

• Security on the site is still sort of weak: only as secure as your email account, no https, and so forth and so on.
• System requires separate registrations to protect alternate and holiday handles. (It would still be relatively easy to flip between handles, though.)
• Some people registered for WPT or the catalog, but don’t want to have enter their password to cap. Or they forgot their password and lost access to the email account they signed up on, requiring manual intervention to get their username back.

If this happens, it won’t be for another month or so, but since this is a major change, I thought I’d get feedback to see if I need to do things differently or not at all. Thoughts?

I just added over a hundred sample images to the movie catalog. There are a few other new improvements to the system like proper sorting on titles, episode numbers for tv shows and serials, and showing the sample images on the list page instead of just the details page. It’s still a work in progress and apart from the “now playing” feature it feeds, most of what will make it really exciting is still in the wings. Now is still a very good time to suggest changes (and catch any mistakes in the data). I should have ability for users to schedule showings of movies ready for a public trial in the next week or two - and honestly, that was my main motivation in building the whole thing. (Well, the next stage of that system, where I start requesting/requiring a small gratuity for the service was).

As I’ve been building this thing I haven’t exactly experienced feature creep, but working with what’s done so far has helped change my priorities for it. The things that I figured could wait for the second version are feeling like they need to be done to before I can rest on my laurels. It’s already clear that what “little” data is there requires better searching tools than just sorting and category filters. Most of all, the data that’s there needs to be fleshed out - both by me and my fellow cappers. Which of course means that I need to add a commenting and rating tool to the catalog. But perhaps the biggest hole I’ve spotted in my plans is that maybe cappers would rather be able to schedule showings of the ephemeral films - and boy, I don’t even want to think about fixing that.

A quick note to anybody who wants to link to all the images I’ve just added: don’t. Well, you can make a hyperlink to them, but don’t try embedding them as images on your pages or posts on other sites - they won’t work. They’re supposed to get IS’ address superimposed on them when they’re embedded somewhere else, but the script that does that is on the fritz. Since it’s my contention that these images are in the public domain, if you want to take them and handle the hosting yourself, I won’t stand in your way. Obviously a link back in exchange for my effort in selecting these and putting them in a handy package would be nice, though.

As you might have noticed, we’ve got a winner in the menu contest - ReptilianSamurai’s design handily beat mine by more than a 2 to 1 margin (16 to 7 to be exact). Congrats to RS and thanks to all who voted. For those of you partial to way the old links would keep the different images and gallery pages in your history, use the old text links that have stayed just where they are right above and below the screengrabs. Actually, I’ve even added them to all the other pages on IS.

To those of you worried about the height of the menu, note that all the stray links it replaces actually took up more space on the page.

I’ve also continued to upload additions to the movielist, like filtering by category. That movie ordering capability is right around the corner, honest. One more thing - WPT now expects cookies to be on to keep you logged on. If demand somehow merits, I may fix that.

Anyway, what do you think sirs?

To make use of the new movie catalog, I’m now displaying a brief “now playing” line during the IS Playhouse hours to help identify the movies and what not that you’re capping. I know this goes against the whole anti-clutter plan I have going with the upcoming layout changes, but everything should come together a little nicer next week.

Now that I’ve unleashed all this knowledge about the available movies, feel free to help me identify actors and artistes that I’ve got a good chunk of material from who might deserve “birthday parties” of their material at IS. It doesn’t have to be a huge chunk of material, a couple of feature films or so, and since it’s about the capping, these don’t have to be great artists. Here are some of the candidates I already have:

Cary Grant 1/18/1904
Lorne Greene 2/12/1915
Jack Webb 4/2/1920
Roger Corman 4/5/1926
Vincent Price 5/27/1911
Moe Howard 6/19/1897
Art Clokey 7/7/1921 (unconfirmed)
Joe Shuster 7/10/1914
Alfred Hitchcock 8/13/1899
Dick York 9/4/1928
Bert I. Gordon 9/24/1922
Jerry Siegel 10/17/1914
Bela Lugosi 10/20/1882
Boris Karloff 11/23/1887

There are a few problems here with dates bunching up.