On my website I publish movie reviews I write. I started writing these on the Macintosh User Group bulletin board in the 1990’s and eventually started saving them, and then eventually published them to my website. While I had written reviews earlier than 1998, I only saved what I wrote from 1998 onward, so my website only goes back to that year. Because I write reviews whenever I watch a movie (not just new releases, but older movies too), I often will go ahead and write a review for pre-1998 movies as well, with no way of publishing them, but keeping them in my Access database where all of the reviews live. When I joined the Disney Movie Club, I wrote reviews of a lot of the older Disney animated features that I was buying, but my list of rankings couldn’t link to those reviews since they were not on the web.
The website breaks down the list of movies by year, including a ranking of all the movies that came out in a year using a ranking number that I put in the database so that ties are broken among all the B+ ratings I give. Also, I add a very short review that is incorporated into Top 10 lists for each year and a year in review page that the database creates for each year. I didn’t want to try to build that in to my reviews of older movies, so I decided to put all of the older movies on a separate “vault” page. I didn’t even know how many older reviews I had.
So today on a gorgeous sunny cool spring day, I decided to add the new function by copying the code that generates web pages of the “archive by year” page and all of the individual reviews to make a vault. There are 37 reviews on the vault page, most written in the last year, but some of them really go way back (I don’t even remember going to see Miracle on 34th Street at The Fox).
When I first set up the vault last year, I just kept an index to all of the pre-1998 movies on a page alphabetically. On my movie review home page I list the last 10 reviews I have written, but I wasn’t including reviews of vaulted movies. While I don’t want to do a Top 10 list of pre-1998 years (I don’t even have movies for every year and some have only one or two) and likewise there is no reason to do a year in a review like I have for 1998-2017 (haven’t done 2018 yet, but soon), I might as well include vault movies in the list of movies by name and the list by grade that I gave the movie. It was actually easier than I thought at first because I just had to stop filtering movies where the year was less than 1998. But then I remembered that 1998+ movie reviews are store in a directory by year whereas vault movies are all thrown into a folder called vault. Still, easy enough to fix by including an If Then block that would write the link to the review one way for 1998+ and another for vault reviews. Since the vault movies were now in the big alphabetical index, I also changed the vault page to sort on the year, which starts with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.