The iCheckMovies Blog

We just did a short update to fix some things and add some more feeds. Besides our news feed you can now subscribe to:

• New movies
• Disappeared movies
• New users
• Movie comments (seperate link per movie, on its detail page)

We had a lot of feedback regarding last week's A Taste of Spain list addition. We've decided to remove this list from the general list database, so it no longer is included in your ranking and checks.

However, the list is still available as a personal list, a beta feature for now. Check out sortile9io's A Taste of Spain to see the new feature in action.

The ability to add lists your own list will be available later.

From this point on we will focus our development efforts on iCheckMovies 2.0, which will feature a lot of much-requested functionality. Bugs will still be fixed, but new features will all be incorporated into the new site. Feel free to contact us to report bugs and suggest new features. You can also use the comment section below.

The full changelog can be seen on our changelog page.

Happy checking!

A lot of people asked us to update the The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films list, so naturally we complied. Thanks to the huge efforts of sortile9io we have also added a list dedicated to spanish movies: A Taste of Spain.

This is not the only thing that is new, check out the full list of changes:

• Improved: viewing a movie's history now shows the data in a fancy chart format and allows one to see the full history (a link to the history page has been added to the movie's context menu when viewing a top list)
• Improved: moved sub navigation to a drop-down menu
• Improved: FAQ page is updated
• Improved: roadmap page is updated
• Bugfix: last checks by geography and users by geography made browser crash due to too many items being shown
• Bugfix: when re-ordering the favorites/wishlist/didn't like lists, the changes were not stored

Enjoy!

Yesterday saw the release of the first iCheckMovies extension. Unfortunately, it didn't do exactly what we wanted it to: include links in the tweets we sent out.

Please accept our apologies for that.

After some serious debugging and testing, we can now happily say it works just fine!

We'd also like to take this opportunity to announce the Facebook page for iCheckMovies. We have no idea how this will benefit us, though, so please enlighten us :)

As you know, iCheckMovies is powered by its growing user base. Last week, we even reached the ten thousand user mark!

To celebrate this, we updated the site with some much requested features:

• You can now connect your Twitter account to your profile. Go to your settings page, click the extensions tab and go from there. You can choose to tweet your checks, your awards, or both!
• You can now filter your awards.
• You can remove your friends. We hope you won't have to use this all too much, though.
• We updated the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list. (Now stop mailing us about it ;) )

The real nerds can check out the changelog for the details.

New year, new update!

Hi there! We wish you all a very happy 2010! To celebrate the new year, we have our first update! This will definitely not be the last, we have some very big things in store for you this year. Having said that, let's return to the update itself:

• Feature: added atom feed for latest blog post
• Feature: allow checked and unchecked movies to be ordered by number of top list appearances and year of release
• Bugfix: newly added movies can now immediately be imported

We have also added six new top lists!

• Kinema Jumpo Top 100 Japanese Movies
• Top 100 Animated Features of All Time
• National Board of Review - Best Film
• Brief Encounters
• 100 Essential Westerns
• MovieSense 101

Enjoy!

The National Film Registry released their new selections for their list (source), and we have added them to our website: National Film Registry. Well, all except four that did not have an IMDb entry. Enjoy!

We know that you guys are passionate about films and really like variety in our top lists. We have added six new top lists that should achieve that goal. Especially the Oriental-minded movie lovers will love the addition of a Chinese films and one Indian films top list. However, do not forget about the respected French Cahiers du Cinéma list as it contains great movies too. Here is the total overview of new lists:

• 501 Must See Movies
• Cahiers du cinéma 100
• The Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures
• Leonard Maltin's 100 Must-See Films Of The 20th Century
• Top 100 Bollywood Films
• A.V. Club - The best films of the '00s

We would like to thank the users that have helped us gather data for these lists, thanks a ton. Hope you enjoy it!

The addition of Google Ads on our site didn't bring us what we wanted: some hard-needed money. So we thought: if we hardly make any money from it, why bother to include it on the website at all? Thus the Google Ads have been removed. We do still need to make some money as we need to pay for the servers iCM is being hosted on (insert sad face here). Luckily, there have been some awesome users that have made a donation, thanks guys!

We did more than remove the ads, we also made the context-menu open on hovering over it, which greatly helps using it. Furthermore, we added three new top lists:

• The Top 500 Horror Movies as selected by the IMDb boards users
• The National Film Registry
• Academy Award's Best Foreign Picture Winners. The data for this list has been gathered by sortile9io, thanks a bunch!

We noticed that we already started having a lot of top lists on our website, so there are probably some lists you are not interested in. We have now added the option to specify what top lists you want to see (e.g. on the lists overview page). In other words, you can now ignore lists you are not interested in. Don't care for silent movies or not interested in those blockbusters? Simply go to the "top lists" tab on your settings page and uncheck those lists! Should you later decide to un-ignore those lists, just re-check them.

Cheers!

You guys have probably noted that viewing your messages was at times quite a slow operation. We felt that this was something we had to fix, so we set about and completely rewrote the messaging code. It now is blazingly fast and should remain so in the future. Perhaps this is a good moment to remove some of those old messages you never look at (as it further improves speed)?

We know most of you guys are always hungry for new top lists, so we listened to what you guys requested and added the following five top lists:

• The Top 100 Silent Era Films
• Venice Film Festival - Golden Lion
• New York Times' The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made
• iCheckMovies - Most Favorite
• iCheckMovies - Most Checked

We would really like you to check out the iCheckMovies - Most Favorite list, as that will allow you to see if the iCM users really have good taste. We at least believe you guys do, Idi i smotri at # 1, Ikiru at # 6, way to go!