

RogerEbert.com relaunched - danso
http://www.rogerebert.com/

======
sivers
Very nice that they did 301 redirects for all the thousands of URLs out there
on their old CMS.

Example: curl -I
[http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2010031...](http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100310/REVIEWS08/100319989/1023)

    
    
      HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
      Cache-Control: no-cache
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
      Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:54:00 GMT
      Location: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-big-lebowski-1998
      Server: nginx/1.2.7
    

Much nicer URLs, now.

I had just posted his list of the 364 “Great Movies” on my site a few days
ago: <http://sivers.org/ebert2>

Nice to know it looks like his great essays will stick around forever.

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jeffgreco
A beautiful effort. This is my new go-to when showing clients what responsive
means. Love that it's optimized up to 1400px.

It's particularly heartbreaking to see that this site was clearly designed to
have Roger's ongoing influence... and it hurt to have his farewell post pop up
in my RSS reader again. Glad to see him have a home on the web befitting his
influence.

~~~
imjared
Came here to say this. They did a knockout job with this. Some pieces that
just aren't easy to make responsive are done really, really well. For an
example, check the filtering mechanism here: <http://www.rogerebert.com/great-
movies>.

Also- the infinite scrolling is lightning fast. They're getting JSON and
throwing it into a template(?) while loading images from Cloudfront. This is
the way it should be done.

Big ups to the devs behind this. A migration is never easy and it looks like
they handled it expertly.

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simonsarris
Wow, this is very pretty. Members-only section feels hokey, I don't like it.
Otherwise great.

I feel stupid saying this because it seems unreasonable of me to believe. But
I feel that I won't enjoy movies as much as I used to, when I knew Roger Ebert
was going to write about them.

~~~
jgolden3
I'm glad you like the site. It's been quite the undertaking...

And I agree, our Members-only section is definitely hokey right now! But give
us a few months to get it fully up and running, and I hope it will become a
useful resource for the intense cinephile and/or Ebert fan, something like
ESPN Insider for a fantasy sports aficionado.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Any chance that you'd package the site up and submit it to the Internet
Archive once its been polished?

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ju2tin
They nuked the entire "Ask the Movie Answer Man" section, which was one of my
favorite things on the site. Even the old archives are gone. A search turns up
links, but they are all broken. :-(

UPDATE: I found it!

<http://www.rogerebert.com/answer-man/>

But I don't see any easy way to search for really old Answer Man stuff in the
archives.

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davidtk
I really dislike the new design. The old site was brown and mellow; like you
were sitting in the dim theater with Ebert after the movie, discussing it
deeply over a cigarette or the remains of your popcorn. New site is bright,
whitewashed, and ephemeral; like the convos in the lobby afterward where
you're trying to say the movie sucked without offending anyone else's opinion,
and after 2 minutes you give up to go back to your car. Old one was unique and
wonderful; new one looks like every other stupid blog. Any Ebert fans agree?

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doomlaser
I've got some UX nitpicks with the search results...

Stuff like: <http://www.rogerebert.com/great-movies>

doesn't actually present basic information to the user, like movie release
date, director, cast, or studio (instead presenting the month/day/year the
review was written). Additionally, date filtering sorts the list by the date
each review was written, which isn't particularly useful.

Search results expand to a multi-column layout when browser width increases,
which makes them hard to scan (imagine if Google did this).

Because results aren't paginated or loaded all at once, there's no way to tell
how many results you have in a search. How many "Great Movies" reviews are
there? How many have I been presented with so far? There's no way to tell
unless you scroll through all of them as they load in.

Otherwise the presentation seems very clean, and in general snappier than the
suntimes.com behemoth.

------
philfreo
Great responsive design. Anyone know which (if any) of the responsive
frameworks/libraries were used to make this?

~~~
lovehasnologic
Thanks philfreo. To answer your question, we didn't use any frameworks for the
responsive layouts. We just let the content guide us to the natural
breakpoints and worked with it from there.

------
dizzystar
His very last review - To the Wonder.

Feels like he wrote that knowing it was his last one. Amazing resolution to
that review.

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hacker_beta
Looks great mobile. I like this.

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kylelibra
Very fitting tribute.

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danso
I always wondered why rogerebert.com redirected to rogerebert.suntimes.com...I
could see the Sun Times wanting him to be inextricably associated with the
newspaper. And I don't think Ebert would've necessarily objected. I remember
reading a column by him a long time ago about the legendary Mike Royko and how
it was a shame he left the Sun-Times to go over to the more prestigious, but
stuffier Chicago Tribune. I think even in this age of journalists making their
own brand, Ebert was intensely loyal to his newspaper.

~~~
ju2tin
I think it's because the Sun Times paid the costs of running the site, but I'm
not 100% sure.

~~~
officemonkey
That's correct, according to Jim Emerson
([http://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/remembering-the-roger-
i-k...](http://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/remembering-the-roger-i-knew))

"At first our site also had the support of the Sun-Times, including Catherine
Lanucha, John Cary, Jack Barry and the company's webstaff, but budget cuts and
layoffs at the paper eventually left us with no day-to-day resources but
ourselves: the only two employees of RogerEbert.com, as we liked to joke."

------
watercup
RIP

