I just launched a new movie site with my Rotten Tomatoes buddy Binh Ngo. It’s called MoviesWithButter.com, a website that tracks upcoming movies through various stages of development by aggregating scoops from the top movie sites on the web.
It all started about a year ago when my friend Wilson forwarded an article from HaoHaoReport.com about their transition from using Pligg to Drupal’s Drigg module, both are open source code that allows any web developer to easily create a Digg/Reddit clone. Back then Drigg was the better tool because it plugs into the powerful Drupal CMS and takes advantage of its vast amount of features. I was already using Drupal for Wopular, so I thought I should test it out with a new site.
I had always wanted to create a Digg for movie gossip sites, because there are lots of them, and they come and go throughout the years. Digg used to have a movies section before their notorious redesign, and their rival Reddit also has one too. The problem with them is they tend to be populated with top 10 lists and link-bait articles. I wanted to created a fully featured movie site powered by the social voting aspect of those sites.
Originally, I thought it would only take me a couple weeks to whip something together. Set up the server; install Ubuntu, Apache, PHP, and MySQL; install Drupal and the Drigg module; do a quicky design; and it’s done! Well, it kinda happened that way. 80% of it was completed in that time, but it’s the 20% of fine-tuning and tweaking that took the rest of the year.
About a month ago, I finally felt like I had something that’s close to ready for launch. I called up my old buddy Binh Ngo, who operated Rotten Tomatoes with me at our apartment during the early days, and asked him to work on the site with me. He said yes.
There’s still lots of tweaking to be done and new features to be built, but at least it’s out there now.
