TheTenWordReview.com
Posted by Neil Crosby on December 27, 2006 11:00 PM
I’m a few days late to the party, but here’s my Christmas Present for the world this year - TheTenWordReview.com. The concept of the site is simple - you write reviews that are exactly ten words long. They can be about anything you like, but they have to be exactly ten words long - not a word shorter, not a word longer.
I’ve been looking after a Ten Word Review community over on LiveJournal for the last three years or so now, but truth be told it’s been a bit neglected lately, and not many people have been using it. So, when Kate mentioned it on her site a month or so ago (I would link, but katemonkey.co.uk is in a bit of a state of deadness at the moment) I decided that the time was ripe to give it a bit of a revamp and break it out into its own site.
The benefits of having a brand new site are numerous. Firstly, it means that all the review about a particular thing get to live on one page. I know that sounds simple, but the way the community worked previously meant that each review started its own thread - it wasn’t the easiest of things to use. Basically, once a review had been written it would vanish into the ether with no easy way to find it again. Already things are a little easier to find on TheTenWordReview.com; in a week or so (once I’ve got the site search up and running) it’ll be stupidly easy to find what you’re looking for.
As you’d probably expect, every review on the site has been marked up, to the best of my ability, as an hReview to help add a bit of extra semantic information to the data held on the site’s pages. I’m also happy that I’ve been able to make the “Ten Word Review” generation process a little easier with a little word count widget that won’t let you submit your review until it’s happy that you’ve written the right number of words (of course, once you do submit your review it’s then checked on the server as well). This little knick-knack has already made it a lot easier for me to write a whole lot of reviews during the testing process of the site, and I’m hoping it’s going to make it easier for other people to do the same.
I’m really excited about this site. I know it’s a little rough around the edges (and in desperate need of some design), but it has a really fun little concept, and I hope that others will enjoy it as much as me.
So, a very Merry Yearly Non-denominational Gift Giving Occasion to you all! Now get over there, create yourself an account, and try it out for yourselves!
If you enjoyed reading this and would like other people to read it as well, please add it to del.icio.us, digg or furl.
If you really enjoyed what you just read, why not buy yourself something from Amazon? You get something nice for yourself, and I get a little bit of commission to pay for servers and the like. Everyone's a winner!
Comments
by cortex on January 17, 2007 05:31 PM
I’m (clearly) having a good time playing with the site this morning—and congrats on the mefi link—but you may want to look into culling markup tags from your entry form. A savvy spammer could more or less destroy the site with automatic form submission, and a less aggressive type could take to manually linking their own content.
It’d be nice if the web were a bit more, well, not crappy in these respects. Good work, regardless, and good luck with this.
by cortex on January 17, 2007 05:33 PM
Like ships passing. Never mind me. :)