you've got a friend in me

So I came up with the idea of an extra bit of functionality to for the site a couple of weeks ago but had been sitting on the idea until now. Whilst running some testing of the site on some mobile and tablet devices at my sisters house (they have some apple products I thought I should test), I spotted a couple of css fixes I needed to do (still waiting bad me) and whilst talking to my nephew as he looked over my shoulder in absolute wonder and saying "You actually built that!!" I was explaining how the site worked and what features/functionality it had.

He bemoaned that it seemed like a lot of work to add a film, but I pointed out that it only took a minute or two, the most time was getting the banner image and thumbnail and then tagging people in the film. That's when I realised that currently I have a lot of people tagged (no joke I just checked and it is 666, ha ha). That got me thinking, with a lot of people in there and the time that it takes to add new people and tag them to a film and possible retrospectively to films I have already added way back when (Ive been adding films for over a year now as I watch them and there are 444 in the database soon to be 445).

So with so many people and a fair amount of films with them tagged to what else could I do with this information other than just showing the actors on a specific film and a list of a films that actor has done. Well I hit upon the idea that when on the listing page for an actor showing all their films, I could also do a search to see how many films they have done with other people. So for example some directors like to use a lot of the same people in their films, so why not also show how many films an actor has done with other actors. So you select  Joe Blogs and it can give you a list of all the other tagged actors he has worked with also showing the amount of films, also allowing you to select and see all the films listed that they have worked on together.

Obviously this is all reliant on me tagging people to films, but seeing as over half the legacy films and all the new films I add have proper tags to them this could work quite well and be interesting as it could show up some crossovers that you didn't realise existed. I have already put together the stored procedures for both parts of this I just now need to implement it into the site, which shouldn't be too much of a problem although it could be a bit of work as it will involve more url rewriting and working out how best to pass the needed variables as before I was only ever sending one batch of info now I need to send two and everything is configured to deal with 1 hmmm.