About Eigapedia

Eigapedia was originally launched in July 2006 as Nippon Cinema, a simple blog featuring reviews of modern-era Japanese movies.

At that time, it was really difficult to find more information on specific actors and directors, so as I did my own research, the site gradually expanded to include more news updates and basic biographical articles.

In 2007, Eigapedia was launched as a MediaWiki-powered sister site to Nippon Cinema, but it soon became apparent that running both sites was time-consuming and counter-productive. The wiki was eventually offloaded to the Wikia network where it still lives today as Eiga Wiki, free for anyone to edit.

The Setup

Eigapedia is currently hosted across two self-managed Linodes running a LEMP stack under Ubuntu Linux.

It was originally built on the content management system ExpressionEngine, but recently the decision was made to switch to Craft.

Contact

Use the Disqus thread below for general comments about the site itself if you don't mind them being public. If you'd like to contact me directly, use this form.

Recent Changes

December 15, 2014

  • I've implemented a new system for categorizing movies by genre, including the ability to combine any two genres for custom lists. The feature is inspired by IMDb's genre browser, which is probably one of the most elegant solutions out there for movie browsing and helpful for people who don't know exactly what they're looking for. Once I'm done manually categorizing several thousand movie entries, something similar will be added to the movies section.

November 14, 2014

  • All filmographies and cast lists in the database have been normalized to use the same basic table structure. They should be a bit easier to read on mobile devices now.

October 30, 2014

  • Filmographies on actor pages are now formatted as tables with roles included where available. This was previously impossible (or at least extremely database intensive) due to the way actor data was entered on movie pages. Huzzah for making the impossible unimpossible!

October 11, 2014

  • Re-designed the main index page to put more emphasis on the latest news updates and DVD/Blu-ray releases. It took about 10 minutes to throw together, so consider it a work in progress as always.

October 06, 2014

  • Embedded YouTube videos that are no longer available on YouTube are now automatically detected and seamlessly replaced with the Eigapedia player. This solves the one major annoyance that has always come with relying on YouTube embeds on the site.

October 05, 2014

  • Eigapedia is now served entirely over SSL (HTTPS) protocol. This switch was made as a very preliminary first step toward creating some sort of user account system in the future, as it's generally a good idea to only log in to sites over secure, encrypted connections.