I’m looking forward to Monday nights in front of the TV. Two of my favorite shows are coming back tonight. Both Heroes and The Big Bang Theory are making their season premiers tonight. Even better, it looks like they might not be on at the same time, at least after tonight. Heroes has a Lost-type checklist show starting at 8pm, the same time that Big Bang Theory is on. As long as the shows don’t change time slots, and the Heroes pre-game show isn’t a regular event, then my Monday night TV schedule is conflict free.
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Dragon Con 2008 was awesome as usual. I have a few things to work on before putting them on FanaticSpace for you to enjoy. There will be a few photos, audio from a couple of panels and a few of my thoughts about the con.
I’m also going to try to get a couple of posts from other people that were there. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do my best begging and hope that it works out.
Wow, this is it. My first blog at FanaticSpace. I’m very excited, cause for the first time I’m able to blog about something I really, really love, the Whedonverse. For any of the uninitiated out there, the Whedonverse is all of the wonderful entertainment created by the incomparable Joss Whedon, which includes tv shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, the movie Serenity, based on the Firefly series, and various graphic novels, such as Fray, Buffy Season 8, and Angel After the Fall. He also writes the Astonishing X-Men, and he’s written screenplays for other movies outside of Buffydom, which I may reference from time to time. He was also a writer for Roseanne, but I probably won’t ever bring that up again.
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It’s been a busy week for me. I’ve got a lot back-end tweaks done and I’m working on even more. Once I get things done I might release a couple of ‘em as plug-ins. We’ll see how useful they are to everyone here at FanaticSpace first. I got some comment formatting done too. Finally found a way to check and see if the commentator is a crew member here without having to hard code anything. That’s easier on me because that means I can add to the Crew without changing code.
Speaking of adding to the FanaticSpace Crew, there are two new authors. That means more cool stuff to look forward to.
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You may have noticed a change in the way that FanaticSpace is structured. I finally got tired of trying to build a decent layout and bought one that I could tweak. I decided to use the magazine version of the Revolution theme for a couple of reasons.
My priorities were multiple layout options and site wide consistency. I even toyed with the idea of switching to a CMS like Drupal that could handle blogs, forums and any kind of page I might need. Another advantage of a CMS would be integration of everything into one account. In the end I decided against the all in one solution. While it does handle everything, it doesn’t handle it in the way that I want.
I decided that I would use the tools I’m familiar with. Now that I have a theme that I like, I can get back to work on content and community building.
I need your opinions
After the posts by Donna and myself, I’ve decided that I should make books a larger part of the site. I’d like to do more posts about books and reading. What I’d like your opinion on is the structure of those posts.
- Should I review books I read?
Or
- Should I open a discussion about a book?
I can see pros and cons for both of those. I’m just not sure what you’d rather see here. That’s why I’m asking you.
What’s the difference?
This is how I imagine these working. If you have other ideas please let me know.
Book Review
- I would choose a book, or let you vote on a book.
- I’d read it and take a few notes.
- I’d come back to the blog and write up a review. It’s pretty straight forward.
Book Discussion
- I would choose a book, or let you vote on a book. That’s the same.
- I’d write a post on the blog to announce what the book is.
- A reading deadline would be set. That way people know when the discussion will start, and will know when to finish the book.
- People that want to join in would, I hope, read the book.
- After the reading deadline I’d come back here and officially open the discussion. I would include some of my opinions and my questions about the book. It wouldn’t be a full review though.
- I would update the post with some, or all, of the relevant comments from the discussion for a period of time. This would make the relevant comments about the book easier to find and make things easier on people taking part. A long list of comments can be hard to follow sometimes.
What do you think?
Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? Do you have any other ideas? I’d appreciate your thoughts on this. I’d really like to make this site something we could all enjoy together.
