Yearly/Monthly Pages and Issue Milestones?

[Phillyman]

As we put more and more information into the Magazine Database, I can extract said information and present it in new ways. One such idea that I am toying with is creating monthly pages. We would have a year folder such as 1983, and within that folder would be each month. Users could browse to September 1983 and any magazines that published a mag in that month would display. I could also do the same with issue numbers, maybe a page for premier issues, issues 25, issues 50, issues 100, issues 150...etc

These pages would be static, I could look into what it would cost to have someone write a PHP script to pull the information dynamically.

Quick Mockup

[kitsunebi]

I'm not saying I would use such a feature, but displaying all the mags in a given month might be kind of neat.  I can't say I have any interest in grouping together "milestone" issues, though.

My dream would be able to type in the name of a game and get an index of all issues it was reviewed in along with the score it was given in each (if applicable), with links to their DB/download pages.  Gamerankings has something like this that includes online reviews with print mag reviews, but their inclusion of print mag reviews is far from complete, particularly with older games.  And while reviews would be my main interest, being able to find what issues had feature articles/previews/strategy guides for a given game would be nice as well.  No need for indexing stuff like codes - that's what Gamefaqs/the internet is for.

Of course, we're nowhere remotely near being able to do anything like this, and probably never will be, but dreams don't have to be realistic.

[Phillyman]

28 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

My dream would be able to type in the name of a game and get an index of all issues it was reviewed in along with the score it was given in each (if applicable), with links to their DB/download pages.  Gamerankings has something like this that includes online reviews with print mag reviews, but their inclusion of print mag reviews is far from complete, particularly with older games.  And while reviews would be my main interest, being able to find what issues had feature articles/previews/strategy guides for a given game would be nice as well.  No need for indexing stuff like codes - that's what Gamefaqs/the internet is for.

Of course, we're nowhere remotely near being able to do anything like this, and probably never will be, but dreams don't have to be realistic.

I don't think we are as far off as you think we are from that. This software allows us to cross reference records with each other. I can create another database, call it Master Database

Video Game <---- pulls titles from the existing VG database as you type

Magazines <----- pulls titles from existing Mag database as you type

Pages <---- page(s) that the information is on

Mention Type <----- is it a review, preview, code, poster, etc

Review Score <--- if a review score, how was it rated

System <--- What game system was it for

Related Games <----for titles that span multiple systems

Download Link <--- Self explainitory

 

So then you would end up with a record......

 

• Bad Dudes (NES)
• Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 4 (November 1989)
• Page 10
• Review
• Steve (6), Ed (5), Donn (5), Jim (4)
• Nintendo Entertainment System
• N/A
• Download Issue

 

 

[sqwirral]

I did that on a local/offline php site just for my own use, it's a really handy feature!

Other plans are to add some filter controls, so you can display just mags for a certain country, publisher, system, etc

Edited September 11, 2017 by sqwirral

[sqwirral]

50 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

My dream would be able to type in the name of a game and get an index of all issues it was reviewed in along with the score it was given in each (if applicable), with links to their DB/download pages.

I started this last year but it's turned into a ridiculously huge undertaking

You can click on the publication to see all the games they reviewed, click on the issue to see games in that issue, or click on the game itself to see which mags reviewed it, etc

Haven't really done any American mags though. All UK stuff.

[Phillyman]

Just a 10 minute mock up, we can always customize how the data displays.

https://www.retromags.com/master-database/nintendo-entertainment-system-records/

[Data]

10 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

My dream would be able to type in the name of a game and get an index of all issues it was reviewed in along with the score it was given in each (if applicable), with links to their DB/download pages.  Gamerankings has something like this that includes online reviews with print mag reviews, but their inclusion of print mag reviews is far from complete, particularly with older games.  And while reviews would be my main interest, being able to find what issues had feature articles/previews/strategy guides for a given game would be nice as well.  No need for indexing stuff like codes - that's what Gamefaqs/the internet is for.

Of course, we're nowhere remotely near being able to do anything like this, and probably never will be, but dreams don't have to be realistic.

I was watching the latest season of Halt and Catch fire last night and became inspired by Joe McMillan, a fictional character who made it big in Silicon Valley as CEO for IBM, then Computer Hardware and now web browsers and search algorithms.  There was a time when we had the world wide web but we never had Lycos, Yahoo or Google.  These companies built algorithms which crawled the internet and indexing web pages automatically.  

We have an advantage right now, a relatively limited amount of magazines to index and the tools to do it.  If somebody was to have all the magazines on one hard drive and then they converted it to PDF, they could hold the data needed to index it page for page, title for title and word for word.  This could be relatively easy to do for private use but the problem for me would be coding it so website users could use it.