Looking up

Hello everyone, and welcome back! The new message board, installed just last week, is taking off and I'm mighty happy to see it! This bodes well for a few other changes I have in store for Crazed Fanboy and the website in general. I'm mainly talking about the recent integration of a database into the system.

As everyone around me has heard me gripe on numerous occasions, I love the PCR and the gang around the world who supports it, but the thing-that-Nolan-built has long been a precarious balancing act between my duties as editor/publisher here and my odious full-time job elsewhere (about which less said the better). It is my plan this year to make THIS my full-time job (There, Christian, I finally said it!). I've streamlined the operation as much as I possibly can, but I still need more hours back during the week to continue developing new projects, many of which have languished on a back-burner for months because I simply can't get to them. Some of those even threaten to profit me.

Therefore, the database. The first manifestation of this is the aforementioned message board.

Lately I've thought long and hard about what energies go where and where I can do the most good. In all likelihood, the main bulk of the Filmmaker's Update section will be re-routed to the the message board except for reporting special events, with photographs and interviews. Most of the event announcements are, of course, of a more temporal nature, and I no longer think keeping a separate archives of old announcements is beneficial. (I'm undecided yet on how long to keep old posts on the message board---I'm still kinda new at this.) A link will be put on the homepage here, to remind everyone where to post their film events.

You might think The Lettercol would be the next to go, but I'm not so sure about that. First thing is that the "Letters to the Editor" is a tradition I'd like to keep, it's where visitors can be fairly lengthy in their prose and writers the same with their rebuttals (discouraged on the MB), not all readers want to screw with the message board but write to the columnists directly (many Lettercol entries originate this way), and finally, all Lettercols are permanently archived whereas the message board posts are not (at least not at this time, altho I've not decided on any time limit).

The message board is far and away the most beneficial thing going as far as interactivity with the fans (and will only get better), the Lettercol will be saved for correspondence of a more permanent status. So it's not going anywhere, at least not yet.

Of course the Homepage will remain unchanged! And all the writer's columns will go on unfettered. (In fact, there's some source code I'm acquiring soon that will benefit that section as well!)