dot-totally.co.uk > Software > WatchRate
WatchRate
WatchRate is basically my experiments into using folksonomy: using tags to identify information. Put simply, the software allows you to rate films and episodes of shows you have watched, and also tag them so you can collect the information together. The idea is simple, the code is simple (and probably, messy too). I developed it for two reasons: one, to help me manage films and episodes I have watched and want to rate simply, and two, so I could advance my skills in MySQL a little bit.
Features
WatchRate features an admin interface, with password, albeit fairly weak security (simple password kept in configuration file) that allows you to add new film ratings, episode ratings to shows, and also edit or delete this information. The admin interface also uses some basic Javascript for adding a new show, where the user selects "New..." from the drop down menu of shows already in the database, and a message box prompts the user to enter new information. Also, another simple javascript function confirms users really want to delete any episodes or films from their list. Viewers can browse the list by tag, and also filter to viewing just film ratings or episode ratings. Using Apache rewrite rules, it also creates clean URIs, such as /tags/adventure/ or /show/the_x_files/.
Future
Possible and better changes for the future include:
Error checking on the administration side - currently, if you dont enter any information into the input boxes, the code doesn't care, and empty information will be entered into the database. Although you can still edit or delete it, it does look messy, so it might be good to have some validation there.- When you press enter (ie, not using the buttons) it defaults to adding a film, and then the validation will say you've not entered a film title/link.
- Browsing by more than one tag - Like del.icio.us, you can use tag1+tag2 to see more than one tag used. This might be useful in the future.
- Better security - Rather than just a simple password, perhaps more security would be nice, or maybe even with multiple users and passwords in the database. The password is stored in a cookie, but it is hashed with MD5, so it is near impossible that anyone will be able work it out.
MySQL table prefixes - Currently all the tables are like: episodes, tags and tags2episodes, etc. It might be useful to use prefixes to help people who can only use one database with their hosting.
Example
To see an example of WatchRate in use, you can see the one I'm personally using here on dot-totally.
I've also integrated it into my Personal page, a feature that is very useful of WatchRate is you can easily implement it using your own choice of template tags into any page - for example you could use it in a sidebar of your weblog. The code I'm using on my personal page is as follows:
$wr = new WatchRate();
$wr->limit = 10; // Only include last 10 results
$wr->overridefilters(false, false, false, false, false); // Don't let results be altered by extra variables
$wr->start(); // Start the WR process
print "<table class=\"linklist\" border=\"0\" width=\"98%\">\n";
while ($wr->ratingsrow()) {
print " <tr>\n";
print " <td><a href=\"" . $wr->getmorelink("", "", "", "", false, true) . "\">" . $wr->gettitle(true) . "</a></td>\n";
print " <td style=\"width:1px\">" . $wr->getrating(true, true) . "</td>\n";
print " </tr>\n";
}
print "</table>\n\n";Documentation
See WatchRate:Template Tags for information on how to use the template tags to customize your copy of WatchRate.
Downloads
You can download WatchRate from the following URL:
WatchRate v0.26 (45kb, released 26th August 2007)
Notes
- This software is released under the GNU General Public License, and both the code and images packaged with the code are free to use and adapt, as long as attribution is given to me.
- This code is very early release - probably not even an alpha release, so please don't blame me if it doesn't work well with you. However, I have tested it fairly roughly on both a Windows server and a Linux Server, and it has performed well.