Times Are a-Changin'

I told you a while back that the old site is going down. Fear the Outside and Angry Skies Productions was a thing I did and had fun doing, but it was never all that serious for the main reason that I could not advertise or sell advertising on GeoCities. It was a business venture in the same sense that a treehouse is a social club.

I know the placeholder for the new site has been up for going on two months now, but there is a reason I did it this way -- a few, actually:

1. So I could talk about the site before it was ready to publish and go live (people see a customized page instead of a generic server host 404).
2. To give the search engines time to pick it up before it goes live.
3. To give the search engines time to purge the old material and URLs from their caches before I reformat and republish them on the new one. Otherwise, I will be penalized for duplicate content. And I might lose a lot of traffic due to people not finding what they are looking for and/or being redirected to the new site and seeing only another 404.
4. To give me time to put together the best site I can and make sure most of the bugs are squished (EW!) and holes are plugged (HOT!) before it goes live.

And it's going to be a kick-ass site -- don't let the hype fool you -- with words and pictures and a blog and little things to click and all that kind of stuff you find on other websites, but that's the whole reason I couldn't just start hanging it. This isn't an "out-of-the-box" site by any means. I'm not using someone else's template(s); old material is being tweaked and reformatted and new content is being developed from scratch; the underlying architecture is still being finalized (file structure, directory tree, hardcoding, etc.) due to careful consideration of future growth; there are forums and a blog, and even planned podcasts (though not all will be immediately available); and very nearly every page is unique in both content and design. And I'm the only one doing it, remember.

Which is the thing: I also run about five blogs right now. In fact, advertisement on these blogs is how I was finally able to afford the website I'd been talking about getting for going on five years now. Trying to keep up with these and develop the site at the same time has kept me under the gun these past few weeks, and when you add my Carpal Tunnel and Degenerative Disc Disease to the mix, there have been several "burn-out" days and many more where I literally just couldn't work, even though I sometimes really wanted to.

So I'm doing what all good micro-managers do when they get in over their heads: I'm quitting.

No, I'm calling in back-up. Over the next few weeks, you will start hearing from an entire team of bloggers here at The Rundown. You may have read some of their work if you've visited any of their blogs through the comments or Blogroll, or you may know them from another blog or online community; some you may not have heard of until now. They were all hand-picked by me to continue blathering about all things insubstantial in my absence, and they know from insubstantiality. And I'll still be chiming-in, too.

As of the moment I write this, this is all temporary; they will be more or less filling-in for me while I try to get The Weirding ready to go live this November (Before Christmas [B.C.] is the definitive deadline I'm working under). But if everything works out and everyone enjoys it, it could very well become a permanent feature. That'd be cool.

I have no idea what everyone will be babbling about, but change is good. I know there will be TV and movie reviews and discussion, but likely a lot more than that. Speaking of change, you should have set your clocks back an hour last night. Thank goodness for computers and cable boxes, huh?