Friday, May 11, 2012

Announcing: Lists from Chip

I wanted to let everyone know about a new service I will be offering.  I have created a separate blog named Lists from Chip.  The goal of it is to provide tracking lists of movies for people to refer to or to use for themselves.  Many people are using one list or another for recommendations on movies to see.  They will be able to find most of them here.

You may be wondering, “What’s the big deal?  I’ve been able to create lists on IMDB and Amazon for years and I can track them on the new Letterboxd site I am beta testing.”  This thing is, on all of those sites you have to go to the trouble of creating the list.  Sure, someone else may have already made the list you want, but you have to find it among the millions of other lists on those sites.  They also require internet access, which may be constant if you live in a big city, but which is less reliable the further out in the country that you get.

If you find a list on Lists from Chip that is interesting to you, you can easily save it to your computer and have it with you at all times.  This also means you can customize it for your unique use.

Why am I doing this?  I just started actively working from the 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book.  I bought a copy way back in 2003 and I had checked off in it which movies I had seen.  I recently joined an organization of bloggers who review movies from the book.  (You can find much more about it, as well as the blog club that has been formed, by reading my post on it here.)

I needed a better way to track what I had seen, had reviewed, that the club had reviewed, etc., so I built my own tracking sheet.  I also researched what movies I had yet to see that were available via Netflix.  At some point a light bulb went on over my head and I realized there were probably others that would like to have a tracking sheet like this, but didn’t have the time to build it.  I was going to post it on this site, but then I stopped to think about other lists I had used over the years.  Why not share those, too?  I kept going with these ideas and the result is the new Lists from Chip site.

You will find the tracking sheets grouped into 10 categories:

1.      1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (and Related Genre Lists)
2.      They Shoot Pictures Don’t They
3.      14 Year Weighted and Consolidated IMDB Top 250 List (1998 – 2011)
4.      American and British Film Institute (AFI and BFI) Lists
5.      Oscars and Golden Globes
6.      Film Awards from Countries Outside the United States
7.      Film Festivals
8.      Publishing Company Lists
9.      Miscellaneous Film Lists
10.  Critics’ Lists – I have none now since these are part of the larger They Shoot Pictures Don’t They list, but I wanted to have a placeholder post in case I decided to do some in the future.

When you get a chance, please check out this new service and leave comments on the various posts for any mistakes you may find, or ideas on how to improve the service.

I have added a permanent link to this new site just below the Home link in the column to the right.

12 comments:

  1. Very cool, and very much feeding into my own obsession.

    I'll eventually look at the AFI/BFI lists, I think. My guess is I'll already be done with most of them by the time I get to 'em.

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  2. @SJHoneywell - Thanks. I actually used the first couple AFI lists (movies and comedies) for a while. I ended up seeing all the movies on each list. While there is some definite crossover to the 1,001 list, the AFI lists probably lean a little more towards the "popular" end of the spectrum than the "technically lauded" end of the spectrum.

    Were you able to open a tracking sheet okay? This is the first time I've tried embedding into a blog. I can get to them, but I am the owner. I had a friend try and she was fine, but it's been really quiet over there so far.

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    1. Yep, they open. You need to be a little patient for the full list to come up, but they do work.

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    2. Good. Thanks for letting me know.

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  3. Are you familiar with icheckmovies.com? It sounds like a perfect fit for what you are looking to do. It's basically a collection of any list you can think of (including all of the ones you mentioned), and once you check off a movie it will tell you every list it is on. You can even import your IMDB ratings to easily get caught up.

    I'm hooked on the site. Hope you find it helpful as well.

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    1. Thanks for the suggestion. I poked around the site as much as I could without creating an account. While it has some things that are good, I doubt I will ever use it.

      First, they own your information, and they are not exactly Microsoft or Google, so if these three guys from the Netherlands lose their funding or their interest, all your compiled info is gone.

      Second, you cannot create your own lists (according to the FAQ). All you can do is suggest new ones and they may or may not create them.

      Third, the lists they have are not necessarily the versions that most people work from (i.e. the 1,001 Movies list is the current list only, not the complete list.)

      Fourth, like every other site (i.e. Letterboxd), it requires you to go to them every single time instead of you having what you need on your own computer. That's why I'm sharing the many lists I have made up - everyone who wants can save them to their own computers and then do whatever they want with them (change them, add their own content, track them, etc.) and not have to worry about the retrictions or longevity of a commercial website.

      While the IMDB import feature is a nice touch, it does nothing for me personally because I have never maintained any voting data on IMDB.

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    2. Fair enough. I wouldn't worry too much about the site going away anytime soon, though. It has a pretty devout group of users, and if for whatever reason the webmasters lost interest, I'm sure another group would step up and keep the site running. Also, you actually can create your own lists, though adding more than one requires a premium membership (about $1/month).

      I can see not wanting to be tied down to a website, but I have found icheckmovies to be a very useful way to keep track of my progress (not to mention an excellent way to find new movies). Either way, good luck with your list progress!

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    3. I don't want to give the wrong impression; I do appreciate the suggestion. It sounded interesting, so I immediately checked it out.

      In my line of work (project management) one of the keys to success is Risk Mitigation so I tend to consider the "what can go wrong and how do I address that" situations even in my everyday life. When buying software packages the single key question is always how stable the company providing the software is. Of course, the stakes are a lot higher there than it is regarding keeping some checklists.

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  4. Great initiative I'll bookmark your new blog right now!

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  5. @Michael Parent - Thanks! I hope you find it useful.

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  6. Hmmm, interesting, I will venture forth and check it out.

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  7. @3guys1movie - Thanks. Let me know what you think.

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