What? Another MLP episode guide, you say? Hear me out, hear me out. I want this guide to be different - better, well designed and maintained, information rich, yet accessible. A tall order, perhaps, but not impossible I hope.
Mirror: http://mlp.meebleforp.com/
- Multiple viewing options (both streaming and downloads) for each episode
- Tags for organization and filtering purposes
- Track episodes watched, and get warning on continuity so that you don't spoil yourself by watching episodes out of order
- Random episode selector
The guide, and all code, resource and data associated with it shall be open source. Host the guide's source on a platform that allows for easy collaboration, and have its data stored in a format that's easily editable.
The show is enjoyed worldwide, and thus the guide should be too. Link to multiple avenues to watch this show, and perhaps in the future other languages sub/dubs. Geo-IP is another option to make the guide more user friendly by only exposing options available to users from that country.
Broadly, this means listing legal options to view the show as far as possible, and limiting the amount of copyrighted materials used. It's unfortunate that outside the US and Europe it's incredibly hard if you want to actually pay for the show (hint hint, Hasbro)
The guide is a static single page website build using node.js, with Jade for
templates. The data for each episode is stored in src/doc. On the front end,
Backbone.js is used to provide structure. Most of the heavy lifting is done
on the front-end.
The code is not very well documented or structured, and although using Backbone.js means that the front-end code isn't completely spaghetti, it could do with some cleaning up and additional comments.
Target browser: All modern desktop browser (responsive layout on todo list), IE8+
- Install node.js
- Install the packages needed -
npm install jade underscore - Run the build script -
node src/build.js
- Create UI for tag exclusion. The code is done (try running
guide.exclude.add({ name: 'song', category: 'story', text: 'Song' })in your console), but not the UI - Add Geo-IP so that additional viewing options for other countries could be included, as well as to highlight / hide relavant options for visitors. MaxMind's free JS GeoIP API seems perfect for this.
- Semi-responsive design for smaller screens / mobile