Earlier this year I wrote about using melative to leech data for season previews, but the ultimate issue has been whether the information is actually in the system or not. Unfortunately, this ridiculous one man show has to spit some hacks to make adding and editing title info “more efficient”, though it still takes quite some time to do the process.*
Today I spent a couple hours updating most of the Spring 2009 titles to air in April. So now these sort of calls actually yield info. The titles are lacking proper synonyms to make the calls intuitive, but here’s the recent additions [via dev-api].
Status Rant
Yes, melative is sort of constantly in shambles (esp on the webui), and I often don’t have motivation to mess with it since I’m the only active user and everyone is nice and comfy using stuff they’re familiar with, but in terms of scale (14 Strong Media) and concept (wikipedia X last.fm X anidb), there isn’t anything that satisfies the problem: “He searched for a site that aggregated meta information on all forms of media…” [about]
Personally, I don’t thrive on the limitations of specific solutions (AniDB, last.fm, spout, MAL), which is why my use regresses, and though I like the very general solutions (wikipedia, delicious, twitter), there’s something I’ve learned, and it’s that both solution types could use improvements.
It boils down that general solutions tend to have little or no context, and that specific solutions have restrictive context. My goal for melative is somewhere in the middle, maintaining a definite context among the major media of the world, but allowing the data to have meaning outside of melative.com. That is the purpose of the API, so that any URI may share a context that exists in melative (e.g. Associate), and that information may be retrieved and related from melative about that context.
What confuses me is the potential progress I can make in a solid week on melative (x), and these sites with tons of users, staff, helpers don’t seem to change. They stay in their realm, and that’s where I get off the boat.
*The process for anime being: Inserting native title with year and season - Google searching for decent images - Accumulating a few standard resources (wiki,ANN,official) - Usually using ANN/wiki meta data for details, production, description, and character fields - Insert synonyms for title
