Wednesday, November 25, 2015

New Archives Page

Hello all,

We have a new Archives Page! Read on to find out more!
Or, instead of reading all the details, stop by and check it out!




This blog has expanded (in posts, mediums, and other ideas) much more than originally expected. That's all well and good, but it also means that we have not been entirely consistent. For example, while we might now be including "animation" in the labels for an animated movie, that was not always the case. We apologize for this and are trying hard to remain consistent from now on, and will do what we can to fix the older posts.

However, all this awesome expansion has made blog navigation a real challenge. Upon arrival, you see the most recent posts, but what if you're looking for an idea for movie night? Do you really want to scroll through the long list of labels (which are all mixed together anyway)? And what if you don't know exactly what you're looking for and the search bar turns up nothing? The "Archives" page is so out of date that it barely gets you anywhere.

Or is it?

That's right folks, we have updated our Archives page! The layout is very different and, we hope, much more helpful. Instead of archiving specific reviews (there are too many for that, and if you're going to be that specific you can use the search bar successfully), it is organized in sections that give you links to label groupings.
Allow me to explain. The Archives page currently has the categories: Big Name Producers, Intended Audience, Medium, MPAA Rating, Our Rating, Review Type, Year Published/Produced, and Genre.
How cool is that?!

As with everything this is an unfinished project. Ideally, we would have "Recommended Age Group" as one of the categories (we are working on getting those labels to work), and we would have a better way to show Year Published other than the actual year (perhaps in intervals of every few decades).

Still, we're thrilled to introduce our new Archives page. Hopefully it makes finding things much easier.
We'd love to hear any feedback you might have on it. Feel free to comment anywhere on the blog and one of us will see the comment. We want to make this page (and the rest of the blog) as useful for you as possible. While we're happy to keep brainstorming ideas, we really appreciate you letting us know what you would find useful as well. After all, this is all for you!

Stop by and check out the new Archives page!


God bless!

2 comments:

grandma jane said...

Took a peek and love it! Great idea! For fun I clicked on a couple links and read some posts again. Easy to see the beauty of being able to find a reference quickly.

I wondered why you didn't put your star rating first on the list ;-)kidding, but... right up front. The fact that so far only two posts have earned five stars from you indicates that you mean business. And that's exactly what is needed as this voice is heard by parents/ caregivers AND the authors, movie makers, song writers etc.
You are in turn rewarding the media producers who do offer meaningful goods, as in crafted with some redeeming values and not just to rake in the dough.

I found my favorite genre right away -- and kudos to you for understanding there is a difference between fantasy and science fiction.

In general I find your mix of old and new offerings refreshing.

Thanks to Maria and Stacy for keeping this a quality resource.

Maria Gianna said...

grandma jane,

Glad you like it! I was hoping to find a good way to make the blog easy to search, especially when a person doesn't have a specific movie in mind (can't tell you how many times I've been in that situation).

Haha. I put it all alphabetically, except for the genres (because the list was so long). That is a thought though, to move it up. I'll run it by Stacy to hear her thoughts on it.

I hadn't realized we were so harsh! What I find particularly funny is that the two things we gave high ratings to were my posts, and children's media. Sometimes, there's just something wonderful about children's media that isn't in other genres.

I certainly hope we are able to be a help to parents, as well as producers. I actually have a post in progress by now on a CD made by some people at my school, so that one will be fun and hopefully encouraging for them.

:) Of course! As I explained to someone last night, sci-fi tends to be grounded in fact, calculated, and then taken into the hypothetical. Fantasy? Well that's anywhere, so long as the author can get the reader to suspend belief. And of course there is high fantasy and low fantasy, but I think for the sake of this blog it's not necessary to distinguish between the two. It's a shame we haven't dome more sci-fi. I'll have to get on that. I do try to keep a mix going, but some of it is (unfortunately) just what I tend to read and watch. I try to keep a broad scope, but there is always more to be studied. Which means we will never run out of reviews to write :)

And thank you for visiting!