Alphabetization

Denise Sawicki | February 25, 2005
Hey Scott, I will bother you with a nitpicking comment while you are not there to defend yourself. Why alphabetize all movies starting with The under T? That's not proper library practice. :)

Anna Gregoline | February 25, 2005
Hmmm, yes.

John E Gunter | February 25, 2005
Well, if the "The" is part of the "Title" of the movie, then when he pulls the information out of the database, it will go into the T section alphabetically. What he would have to do in order to stop that would be to make the name of the movie, "Wedding Date, The". Otherwise, that's how things get ordered.

John

Scott Horowitz | February 25, 2005
Or, he could write a procedure that filters out "The" from the title when querying the DB, and sort it that way.

John E Gunter | February 26, 2005
True, but that means more work and most web developers are lazy folk! :-D

John

Scott Horowitz | February 27, 2005
it actually would be about 5 minutes worth of programming. You just call a simple function that does an instring command on the title looking for "the " and filter it if in it.

Scott Hardie | February 27, 2005
I alphabetize them under "The" not out of laziness (which I admit is a prime motivator for many other deficiencies of this site), but because I actually consider "The" to be part of the title of the film. Except in cases of foreign films that have been renamed for stateside release, I always title a film according to what it calls itself on-screen, such as "S1m0ne" instead of "Simone" or "interMission" instead of "Intermission." I reject the offiical formatting rules when I wish (as I mentioned elsewhere, I underline book titles instead of italicizing them), so I don't claim that I'm in the right or anything. It's just my preference.

When I spotted this in the list, I thought it was going to be about the capitalization of TC discussions for some reason. Even though discussions have always used fairly conventional capitalization, for a long time I always had to go into the database and fix them, since many authors like to write in all lower-case except the first letter. Finally I wrote a function to capitalize them for me, but even that has screwed up three times in three weeks now.

Patrick Little | February 28, 2005
Does that mean you are going to write the five minutes of code, Mr. Horowitz? :)

Scott Horowitz | February 28, 2005
No, I'm writing enough code for my current database project, and I'm extremely lazy.

John E Gunter | February 28, 2005
I wouldn't say your site has deficiencies Scott!

But good that you're doing it your way and sticking to it!

John