State of the Blog: catchin' up n' checkin' out
I'm away now until next Sunday (11 Oct), so many of this week's reviews will be delayed until next week. I have seen a few shows ahead of time (Chuck, Stargate Universe) in the hope of squeezing out a quick review, and I'll try my best with a few others, but we'll se. It was enough of a struggle to catch-up on the stuff I missed last weekend, so it may take me awhile to work through a seven-day backlog. Basically, expect disruption until mid-month, and reviews for Crash and Off The Hook (which were always bonuses I managed to squeeze in) will probably bite the dust now as a consequence.
Blog matters, then. I have imported all the Blogger comments that populated DMD before I started using third-party software Disqus last year (thanks to their new import feature). I guess it doesn't matter to readers very much, but now that every comment's part of the Disqus software it's good to know there's a unified format to the blog from beginning to present. Indeed, Disqus and Blogger are having spurts of creativity just now (the latter because it's their 10th birthday), so you may spot little changes and improvements as I pick n' choose what to implement here from each of their bag o' goodies.
While it's on my mind, let me again encourage regular commenters to upload an avatar. Most of you have, but there are still a few recurring names with "no face". The default avatar is now a DMD logo (I got rid of those grey-box faces, although they still appear on the sidebar, oddly), but it would be nice to see more people use personalized images. It gives the place colour and personality. Disqus is becoming quite prolific on the 'net, so chances are you'll stumble upon other Disqus-powered websites/blogs and be grateful you bothered to do this.
You may have noticed more advertising about the place, too. This blog was never intended to be a commercial venture, but I see no problem with making a few pennies on the side. Most blogs/sites carry adverts these days and we're not talking a fortune here. At the very least it'll pay for additional storage space when my 1GB Picasa account inevitably runs out. Anyway, there are strict and enforced rules about how you go about advertising online, so I'll say no more. Just know this: it's there, I've tried to ensure it's not too intrusive, I don't think it slows down the blog to any huge extent, and that's that.
As always, my absence won't mean DMD will be a ghost town for a week, as I usually find time to blog about something, and regular features like Monday's TV Picks and Friday's Box Office charts will still go up. There's also something Monty Python-related for Monday ready to go up, and the possibility DMD will hit a huge milestone very soon, which won't go unmentioned...
Anyway, I'll try to update my Twitter more than I have been doing in recent weeks, if you want to check that out, too.
