Movie Ratings

I have been writing movie reviews for years. It all started in the late 90s when I was watching and writing consistently. Unfortunately, I never saved my old reviews and that saddens me. The ones that I posted to rec.arts.movies.reviews still exist in Google Groups, which is nice. I had a long break from writing when I stopped watching movies regularly – having kids will do that. In the last couple of years, I have been watching more movies and writing regularly.

Ever since I began reviewing movies, I resisted putting a rating in any of my reviews. A few years ago, off to the side, I started rating movies at Trakt and The Movie Database. In this world of getting information quickly, I figured adding my ratings to my reviews would make them more useful.

Last night I spent time redoing my movie review template (Hugo) and adding ratings into the metadata of my reviews. I finally have everything configured and the site has been re-rendered with ratings.

Along the way, I also tweaked the JSON-LD information in the movie review template to expose the movie ratings to search indexers. That was a lot of fun trying to figure out how to best integrate it into the template. Google has a really nice tool for validating Structured Data, found here.

Update 4/28/21: It works! The Google indexer must be indexing my stuff constantly. My review of The Rock is already showing the extra metadata – The image, “Rating” and “Reviewer”. That’s pretty neat.