December 19th, 2005

First Try at Structured Blogging: Review of King Kong

by Joshua Porter | 4 Comments

King Kong

IMDB

Year: 2005

Director: Peter Jackson

Length: 3

Category: Action

Media: Film

Rating: 5 out of 5

Running down the very short list of reasons why reviewers on Rottentomatoes.com didn’t like King Kong, one reason sticks out like a sore thumb: the movie was too long. In almost every case that a reviewer didn’t give the movie glowing reviews, it was because of its three hour length.

But why not 3 hours of enjoyment instead of 2?

The length of the movie had only a small effect on me. A couple of scenes could probably be pared down a minute or two, but the fact is that they’re so good it’s debatable if they shouldn’t have gone on longer. In one scene, the mishmash group of moviemakers and sailors trying to rescue Ann Darrow (played by Naomi Watts) get caught up in a stampede of Brontosaurai. For several minutes, they run alongside the dinosaurs trying to keep from getting squashed. At the end of it, those who escape carry on their search, and you realize you can stop holding your breath. It’s every bit as wild as a roller coaster ride…

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Comments ( 4 Responses so far )

1. Brady Joslin on December 20th, 2005 (Comment) #

I’m also testing the plug-in. One thing that irked me was the formatting tags automatically thrown into the HTML by for the entries. For example, the media descriptions (director, rating, year, etc.) fields at the beginning of the review had bold tags and p tags outputting into the HTML on the page.

I wanted more control over this so went poking around for I could change this up a little bit. If you are interested, look in wpsb-files/microcontent/descriptions/ and you’ll see some files like review-book.xml. Pop that open and you’ll see that’s where these tags are coming from. Make whatever changes you want (keep the XML valid) in those files. After making any changes, you’ll need to open the posting for editing in Wordpress and republish them to be re-rendered.

Hope this helps! I have a few sample review over on my blog you can check out - bradyjoslin.com/blog/

2. Kevin Burton on December 20th, 2005 (Comment) #

I hate the preamble (year, hours, etc). That should go after the text I think. I don’t care what year it’s showing.

It’s about the reader not the robot…….

3. Bob Wyman on December 22nd, 2005 (Comment) #

I hope you folk realize that you can endlessly customize the Structured Blogging output formats until the results look just like you want them to look. Kevin, if you want preamble data to go below the text, you can make it happen. It’s just a small matter of programming… (it should get easier in the future.) Brady, if you want to drop some bold tags, then please don’t hesitate to do so. Frankly, I wish someone would modify the templates to make it all much more compact on the screen…

I sure hope people will be as creative as possible in defining new templates for entries. It would be a drag if all sites’ reviews looked exactly the same.

bob wyman

4. Phillip Pearson on January 8th, 2006 (Comment) #

I should probably change the ‘b’ tags into spans with a classname, so you could just drop all the bold headings by deleting a line in a CSS file somewhere.

If you do change the XML files and think that the changed versions would work better for the general case (the average user) than what was shipped with the plugins, please let me know and I’ll see about including your changes in the official distribution. The files shipped there represent the best we could do in the time available, but there’s plenty of room for improvement!

Bob: it’s pretty easy to change the formatting in the current plugins… now all you need to do is edit an XML file - no programming required any more