2010 was a banner year for TarsTarkas.NET (they all are, because we’re jawesome!) which saw the most activity yet of our six years.
The biggest news is the Politisink spinoff site, the Wingnut Web feature growing into a monster that demanded its own domain name, so we gave it to it! We got two lawsuit threats so far, which have caused the usual laughing in response to the baseless claims.
Over the summer, we decided that Mambo just wasn’t going to cut it anymore as a CMS, and begun the painful conversion to WordPress as our CMS. Actually, it was relatively pain-free, aside from losing six years of links and Google rankings. Our Google rankings got nailed even further thanks to a hacker attack that happened shortly after the WordPress conversion, the hacker operating out of the Ukraine (and probably an automated bot) inserted malicious code via the message board that pretty much is unused except among the writing staff. So that was a headache and a half to fix, but no permanent damage was done and despite thousands of access attempts a day from Ukrainian computers, we defeated those mofos!
Tragedy struck the Tars Tarkas household as both the desktop computer and a laptop computer decided to go to computer heaven. The laptop’s death took about 15 written reviews with it, reviews I hadn’t uploaded to the site yet as drafts because it was right after the hacker mess and I hadn’t gotten around to it. We’re also down to just one computer at home, this lack of computers becoming obvious as updates have slowed, sharing being caring, but not good for updating sites constantly.
As for content, besides the constant flow of movie reviews, we also began video reviews with the Discount Puppet Explosion 411 series and began podcasts with Todd of FourDK. The podcast series now has a name (which will be revealed when the next one is uploaded) and the video reviews are doing better than I though a series where a Cabbage Patch Kid with a fake mustache being waved at the camera would. 2010 is also the only year we’ve skipped a theme/Godzilla month, but one will return in 2011 along with possibly a makeup month. Maybe. Some films are still deep in storage, but I have a scheme to get around that.
2011 will be a banner year, and will bring: More reviews. More videos. More podcasts. More cult movie news. More random articles. More films you never heard of. More films you wish you hadn’t. More intensely-researched films from countries with rich history of cinema not well known in the West. More quickly-written sarcastic pieces on softcore fluff that will get 100x more views. More typos. More more more. Enjoy the more.
2011 might even see me get around to making banner images for the main site and the blog. My copy of Photoshop died with one of the computers, but some of the free software is getting pretty good and I have some images saved for use in eventual banners. But then, 2012 might be a good year to make banner images, I hear it will be a banner year…
The jawesomeness….continues!
