none--awesome work! me likey.

Originally posted by: none

As for the basic listing page, i'm slowly getting away from the color key (maybe ver3 will remove it) but i would like to maintain someway to differentiate between cannon, official, semi-official and fan activities. Is it enough that fan preservation versions would only be mentioned in the individual Entry pages? (i think this is what you we're alluding too) So most likely the Type category will disappear. Spacewise there's room on this main page for other info, which would be important enough to show up here?

i would actually list fan preservation versions (which I"d call "fan editions" for the sake of shortness/clarity) and fan edits on this list as their own items. i'm not sure how I feel about listing the movies themselves, actually; i'm worried that once we get into tracking the various official releases of the films, we'll get very bogged down! but i guess that's a hurdle to overcome.

my thought is that we could combine the medium and type listing into one listing, Category, where we'll list the various categories. Here's a start at a list of categories; let me know anything I've missed. i'm trying to be as generic as I can so that we don't have fifty million of them.

Theatrical
VHS
DVD
LD
Bootleg
TV Special
TV Guest Star
Fan Edition
Fan Edit
Fan Doc

those could have their own color codes if you wanted in addition to the names; that would look cool and help with visual organization.

Originally posted by: none

One way to have it so that the complete listing can be viewed on the same page with the individual entries would be to use frames:
http://noneinc.com/Archive/StarWarsMedia/SWMediaMain.html

That will give you some sense of how that might work. thus each entry would have a link which would end up in the Entry Section below.

i like the frames version a lot, actually. that could be something the page evolves into once the major main list is complete, so that we can start just by compiling the dirty facts into a big list, and then adding individual item pages to that.

Originally posted by: none

As for help, at the moment just provide feedback on the set up. Feel free to do a save as and muck around with what's been done. Once everyone's satisfied with the bones, then we can all type type type all the information in.

well, i'm not much with HTML, as I've said, so for now I think I'll concentrate on compiling info so that once we have the format, we can have some kind of massive initial dump that will get everything up there to start.

Originally posted by: none

Having filtering capabilities, means having a database system. (PHP? is that the correct terminology?) I personally don't know it, but would be happy to learn it, need some guidance, i don't know where to start. It would be great if a database could be set up, and anyone could add information, like how wikipedia works...

...could we use wikipedia? Anyone have any experience with their system?
Here's their 'Star Wars' entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_wars
none

i have no experience with wikipedia, but i just gave some of their FAQs a quick read. i'm not sure if using it would give us the flexibility we want with the info and how it's presented. as I see it, it'd basically mean creating one big long entry, or many many small entries, which would be able to be edited by anyone, but wouldn't be very efficiently organized.

along those lines, we could easily do something like this on a livejournal or something. but again, same problem: we'd basically create lots of little entries, maybe one for each item. and it'd be hard to order them at all, let alone chronologically, so if something new came up for 1983 for some reason, I'm not sure how you'd put it in the right order. that'd not be such a problem with a wikipedia entry.

the great thing about the list version you have now is that it's a condensed and easily-consumed version of the info, organized in a logical way. it also allows for a poor man's "search" using the find function of the browser, and it allows for later entries to be easily dropped in anywhere on the timeline. so if we learn that mark hamill was on leno in 1997 or something six months from now, we can drop it into the list.

unless someone has the skills and time to build a user interface--or unless there's an interface out there on the web that will let us do this--i don't see how we can set something up that has filters, or that everyone can physically edit. the closest thing would be for this thread or another new thread to exist solely for info for this page, and then the page would have to be updated...

which shouldn't be too work-intensive, especially if we work hard on that initial dump.

if we set, say, 1997 as our cut-off year (basically from the beginning to the SE era) and just work hard on that for a few weeks, I bet we can get a rockin' initial list. the info I put together for those early years was actually pretty easy--granted, it's not comprehensive, but maybe we spend a week with everyone who can posting all the info they can find, then edit that into a text list, and then that gets sent to you for the initial list?

if there's a way for me to help with that data entry for the page itself, i would gladly do it, in excel or whatever.