I am a listmaniac. I keep track of my RPG books at RPG.net; my Anime watched at MyAnimeList; my owned DVDs at dvdaficionado.com; and video games at PlayFire and GameFAQs.
I’m looking for ways to track some other things, though, and I have yet to find satisfactory sites to help me. I want to get some Straight Dope recommendations for :
[ul]
[li]Books (Read and/or Owned)[/li][li]Comic Books (Owned)[/li][li]Movies (Seen)[/li][/ul]
I’ve poked around at some Comic Book DB sites before, but I never found a free one that had decent performance. That was a few years ago, though. Similarly, I figure I can track seen movies at IMDB, but the last time I looked into it, their interface was kind of annoying.
Ideally, I’m looking for free sites that have extensive catalogs, a friendly interface, and some kind of ‘public’ view of one’s list available. ‘Wishlisting’ is a nice bonus - adding books I want to read in the future, for example. Any recommendations?
For books, Goodreads is a good place to start. You can list what you’re currently reading, mark books to be read later, and rate books so they stay in your library of books you’ve read.
And for movies, try Letterboxd. There’s a social-networking aspect to it, but you can just ignore that and use it as a diary for watching and rating films. You can make lots of different kinds of lists, too, including movies you want to watch.
Obviously, you don’t understand the difference in the level of effort it takes to hand-make a list compared to checking off boxes online. Speaking as someone who has a number of home-made spreadsheets for a variety of things - better that than than a word processor - a well-designed online list is far less hassle.
And comparing checklists with friends is its own fun.
It’s the diary aspect of it that I like the most. Sure, I can look at what I got from Netflix on certain dates, but when did I watch them? I can also look at my movie stubs to get an idea what I saw in theaters (yes, I’m one of those dorks who saves her stubs), but I’d have to look at each one to see the date. With Letterboxd, I have a clear, concise idea of how many movies I watched in a year. Plus, the list-making, tagging, and sorting abilities are really cool, too. Netflix’s sorting capabilities are crap. And if you like reading other people’s writing, the quality of reviews and comments from other users seems higher here than it does at Netflix or Amazon. No “OMG, this movie was totes gay lol,” at least that I’ve seen.
I also think the site itself is very attractive, with the very nice poster art standing out against the plain black background. I could just make a list of movies I’ve seen and dates on a spreadsheet, but this seems so much fancier.
I’m a stub-saver as well. I do actually have a spreadsheet of movies seen, but I didn’t track the ‘whens’. Letterboxd looks really good - the only quibble I have after a quicky look-see is that it doesn’t do television, but that’s not a damning flaw. Any thoughts on Goodreads?
I really like Workflowy for keeping lists of all sorts of things. It’s essentially an endless document with easily added collapsible subsections. It’s possible to share and export subsections of the list. It requires very little thought to use well, doesn’t require anything but a browser, and the basic service is free.
Doesn’t look useful to me for the kind of lists I have in mind - I don’t see an advantage to it over, say, writing up a list in a word processor and posting it to Google Docs.
