Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Flying off the handle at IMDb

Back in February, I commented on how the IMDb changed their "born on this day" pages to make them virtually unusable, not having the names in chronological or alphabetical order. About a month later, they changed back, which was a welcome change to policy. Unfortunately, they seemed to have changed again, with the change this time possibly being even worse than the February change.

The main page link to the born on page links to the "Starmeter" ranking, whatever that is. There are links to alphabetical, height (why?), and even date (actually, year) of birth/date of death; each of these can be put in either ascending or descending order. On the face of it, this is an improvement. In reality, however, there's one important change that's made the site much less usable: IMDb have decided to put only 50 names on a page, and there doesn't seem to be a link to get all of the names on one page. So, if you want the people born in, say, the 1920s, you'll have to click through a bunch of pages to get to them. Irritating to no end.

But wait, there's more! If you click on the alphabetical listings, you'll see that the listings are alphabetical... by given name, and not by family name! Producer Adolph Zukor would presumably come long before Ursula Andress (although I don't think both have a common birthday). That having been said, in looking up Zukor's birthday, IMDb haven't closed the back door to the full chronological list. No clue how long that's going to be left up, of course.

As for the people born on September 8, I see Grace Metalious' name on the list.

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