Many of you have probably noticed that Fear the Outside has stopped growing. I haven't updated anything on the site in about a year (excepting the original Rundown, which this replaced) and I have not gone back in and revised anything posted since about the same time.
The site has been abandoned and will be closing down. It will be converted into my personal website, an extension of my 360 profile. The truth is that it was never a very good site, in that I was not only learning about presentation and design, but also different programs and ideas. About five different GUI design programs were used, along with hours' of hand-coding, to create the site over the course of 8 years. Anyone who visited the site over the years knows I changed the overall site design many times over the years, and focused on various departments at different times (many of which have still not seen the light of day or were only up a short while). There was never a comprehensive plan for it and it showed.
Angry Skies Productions is now defunct. In truth, I was the only constant and serious provider; many others worked peripherally, as players in the various campaigns supported, contributing individual pieces (artwork, the layouts for a building, a corporation write-up, etc.), and the like. That is not to downplay their contributions! It is simply to point out that since I moved ad no longer play with those guys, they never really had a huge impact on the site or what I was doing anyway.
Which brings me to The Big News:
The Weirding is my new, real website. It will feature much the same content (updated, revised, and better presented) as Fear the Outside, but with far more stuff: new content, departments, foci, subjects and interests, and much more. Since I will be able to provide advertising and sponsors, I will be able to spend more time actually working on things, which means more stuff for you!
I have always talked about all the stuff I have and how I was working to get it coded-up and so forth in order to publish, and I know I made a lot of promises I never followed-through on, but the truth is that GeoCities does not allow for advertising, so it was all a labor of love... labor being the keyword here! Don't get me wrong, I loved doing it and being able to share it with others, but that simply wasn't enough of a motivating factor to keep me working as much as I'd like to have.
Aside from the lack of sponsorship, I was limited in many other ways: I could have started a Yahoo! Group, but there are already far too many of them -- most of which don't get much traffic anyway -- but I couldn't add a forum or chat; spam is so rampant, it was a gamble to include an e-mail address anywhere on there; since I got no return from it, I simply couldn't spend a lot of time promoting, marketing, and updating it. It was a hobby site from jumpstreet.
But all of that has changed now. The Weirding will be your home to all things cool on the web: a real, live, virtual community catering to the geek crowd. More than just a directory or portal, The Weirding will provide up-to-date news and reviews for TV, film, comics, RPGs, books, and more; forums for discussions of all kinds; tons of original content for all sorts of things, namely RPGs (and, as always, continued support for many older, abandoned games systems) and sequential art; products and sponsors that cater to our needs and interests; all sorts of computing, Internet, blogging, and web design tips and resources; an actual writing department (I know the old one never got up and going)... and so much more.
Unlike similar sites, The Weirding will not be an all-in-one site; it is a content-rich networking site specifically for geeks. People into comics and sequential art, B-rater horror flicks, sci-fi shows, computing and the Internet, role-playing games - just all things geeky - will find plenty of stuff to engage in and check out. But instead of imitating other sites or attempting to "redesign the wheel," The Weirding will partner will other focused sites to provide a larger network of Internet sites which will bring you the best of the Internet in an integrated environment.
Further, there will be plenty of opportunities for member development, which will boost your Internet presence, help establish you as an authority in your chosen field(s), and eventually even pay!
There is a lot more to come and I hope everyone gets as excited about it as I obviously am, but things are still being developed and finalized. With luck, The Weirding is tentatively scheduled to go live on or before Halloween. I'll keep you updated and I know I will see you there!
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