Screenwriting 101
Following a reader’s suggestion, I added a 101 section to the sidebar to highlight some of the introductory how-to articles on screenwriting.
This site houses about 950 posts, of which more than 500 are of the non-expiring educational variety. I’d love to find a way to guide new visitors (and aspiring screenwriters) through them without annoying longtime readers. So consider this a call for advice. I’d especially welcome links to sites that do a great job walking readers through a lot of related articles.
Currently, archives are broken down by category, a listing of which can be found at the bottom of each page. It’s not a great way to browse. Adding tags could help (maybe a ‘101′ track, or ‘character’ track), but my hunch is that it’s going to take more human work than semantic upgrading to really be worthwhile.1
Don’t be shy with crazy suggestions. Even if it’s 100 hours worth of work, it’s no challenge to bring in a cadre of film students to implement it.
- The [wiki](http://johnaugust.com/jawiki) was supposed to handle some of this, but it has lain fallow for quite a while. ↩
Articles
April 29th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
An approach to archives that I like is to have the titles of all posts listed on a single archive page, divided in categories. Kind of like what I did with http://www.lostblog.net/archives/ when I was still running that site, but with category names instead of months as titles. That way it’s easy to scan the page and look for posts that might be interesting.
Problogger har a pretty nice archives page too http://www.problogger.net/archives/
A separate page where you link to the vital posts might also be a good idea. Example: http://www.copyblogger.com/copywriting-101/
Whatever you decide to do, I think it’s a great idea to make it as easy as possible for new readers to find some of your best posts!
April 29th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Personally I think tags would be sufficient, as long as they are extensive and CONSISTENT. So often on blogs the tags seem to only catch a fraction of the articles on a subject, either because there is a similar but distinct tag for the same subject, or because the tagging has been intermittent and missed posts.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
A link at the top that links to your Q and A section, which is then divided up into sections like “Basics” “Character” “Dialogue” etc. For the most part, the titles don’t really clue us in as to what the QandA is about. Maybe also having someone go through to add more tags to each article, so they get more and more specific? Just an idea. I know it’s mostly set up like that now, but just a move to the top makes it much easier to find.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I agree with Andreas.
I would suggest making ‘Screenwriting 101′ a page, which can then simply list the articles in some kind of order… I would have said list cats but your categories are a tad crazy, John! =P Then, you could always tidy them up so that each article only belongs to one category (joys of permalinks.) Or, of course, simply omit certain categories in the tags…
A page would just be a very simple and obvious way to go — it’s what I would look for when browsing anyway =)
April 29th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
There’s a WordPress plugin that provides a way to organize posts. Search the WordPress plugin area for Organize Series. I think it would help you organize 101 posts like a book.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I dunno John, maybe you could just have a section (since Q&A appears to be difficult a challenge for some of your readers) that simply says, “GIVE ME YOUR IDEA–don’t worry if it’s the stupidest thing ever–just give me the idea and I’ll write your screenplay for you. You can put your name on it, I’ll find you an agent, manager, and somebody to produce the damn thing. And after that I’ll write your next ten screenplays as well. And I’ll never take any credit or accept any money in return.”
Now, that would really help.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Excellent. Many thanks for taking the time out to do this.
April 30th, 2008 at 5:35 am
John,
This is very Web2.0 of you and I appreciate your reaching out to the audience. Similar audience-centric actions might help you semantically organize your site (taking a note from Clay Shirkey’s “Semantic Web.”)
Use both tags and categories
Encourage the audience to tag for you. Semantically tagging your blog would be a lot of work. Furthermore there is no guarantee that an audience member searching your site will use the same semantics when looking for something. If you allow users to tag (and bookmark) the posts for you, a plurality of emergent categories will arrive. Diehard users will help create a set of consistent labels while still allowing for an emergent ‘folksonomy’ of meta-data.
Reflect all collected data back to the audience Your site should automatically collect a bunch of minutia that may encourage users to surf your site. For example, simply reflect back how often posts are ‘clicked’ and the audience will know which are the most popular. This is one form of popularity, and, provides an emergent navigation scheme where new users can understand where the ‘Big Ideas’ are.
If you allow tagging, reflect how often a post is tagged by a specific semantic. Or, if you’re looking for a specific semantic, reflect back to the audience how often the audience has tagged it so.
This may sound a bit extreme for a couple of hundred posts, but these are the approaches YouTube and Amazon have used with great success. It will take more than film interns to accomplish, but if you need someone, please do not hesitate to drop me a line.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Not only is that awesome, but you have made excellent use of the word “lain.”
April 30th, 2008 at 8:49 am
The best example of easy to navigate archiving in a blog I have seen is the photography/lighting blog Strobist. http://strobist.blogspot.com
Their Lighting 101 and 102 sections are extremely easy to use.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
OK. This maybe the most radical, yet most-used method for something like that. First you get a database. Then you create a table that contains all of the articles. Then you add an AJAX drop down that lets you type. As the person types, the app goes to the database and queries against what’s typed. You’ve probably seen this with Google. Then you add an AJAX data grid that displays all returned values. Each row in the grid has a link that will open a new window or populate a different area of the page.
Another method would be to use frames. You could have a listing of articles which display in the frame when clicked.
I would use the DB method because you can update the DB and not change any code.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
You welcome link suggestions John?
How about http://www.filmschooljournal.com/
That’s my site :) … was actually inspired by you… I too wanted to pass along what I’ve learned to others… even though I’m still currently a film student… never too early to pass along one’s knowledge though.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I’d throw in an explanation that the download section contains scripts, treatments, etc. I guess I’ve seen that link for a while now but must have assumed that it wallpaper with your mug on it or something. It wasn’t until I saw some post referring to it that I realized there was a lot of interesting stuff there.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:28 am
You could also try a wiki. When I started my Production-Now blog it was mostly information about subjects, not blog posts. I then ported (read: copy->paste) all that data to a wetpaint.com wiki that I made. Now the content is search-able and I can play with the posts’ layout/order.
If you don’t like wetpaint, there are other wiki generators out there… but that was the first one I heard of and it’s really easy to use.
~Luke
May 17th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Put polls on each article, let your readers vote on the type, value etc of each article. Let ppl know what you’re doing, wait awhile, then order the articles accordingly. Much easier than thinking!