captsolo weblog

Galway Film Fleadh starts tonight.
Good news for those of us who love good cinema.

Unfortunately upon looking at its official site I have to start with some critique.

The site is one of those very nicely designed (Flash, etc.), but unuseable sites. The most important to me is the schedule of when and what films are shown.

First problem: you can't see a full, readable schedule with all films for a given day or a whole festival. Instead you have a nice, little "frame" which you have to scroll through to see what's on a given day.

Second problem: needless to say, you can not normally print a full list of films from the nice little thingie mentioned in #1.

Third problem: lack of unique URLs - while browsing the site you see the same web address in the browser all the time. This means you don't have an address for a schedule of any given day or a page for a particular film. And you can not send a link to a friend saying "Look! This is a really good film I'd like to go to".

Creators of this site might learn from a website of a similar international film festival - Arsenals.
Here are some nice links:
- Full schedule of "Arsenāls 2004"
- List of movies - can be interesting to see what's there
- "Life is a miracle" - a single film view.
you can press 'When and Where' to get a schedule highlighting when the movie will be shown. ; some film pages feature movie fragments.

Also nice:
- ability to personalize the site (My Arsenals) and create your own viewing schedule
- ability to rate films and see how others rated them

We could go further and wish for an RSS feed with movie show times, but I guess that's too much to ask for now.

Yet, although it might sound strange (isn't RSS for blogs only?!), RSS can also be used to present information about event time/place information. The benefit is that the information is presented in a computer-readable form and anyone can reuse this information and create a better service.