Today is the second anniversary of Fan Cinema Today, so to celebrate in style, the site has undergone a redesign to make it easier to read, more fun to explore and generally cooler. Some of the new features include:
THE HEADER
The pitch black header at the top of each page is gone, replaced by great shots and behind-the-scenes photos from numerous famous fan films. There’s about 50 headers in the system today, and the site randomly chooses one every time you reload the page. I added the new headers to acknowledge many of the great fan films out there and to hopefully intrigue visitors—if you see something that looks cool, search for it on the net and treat yourself to a good movie. I plan to keep adding new images as time goes on, so if you have some hi-res shots from your fan film that might make for a good header, drop me a line.
SIDEBAR ONE
It’s dedicated mostly to housekeeping duties, The site has always given you the latest fan film news, but sometimes finding older material was difficult; now all the search/archive stuff is easily found in the left sidebar, instead of having it buried beneath info about Homemade Hollywood and my fan film author talks. Speaking of which…
SIDEBAR TWO
All the stuff about my fan film book and the talks has been moved here, keeping it upfront and in your face, but not quite as domineering as in the past. Giving this material its own sidebar allows me to add to it freely without forcing the housekeeping stuff way down the page.
FAN FILM DVD & GEAR SHOP
While I gave it a snarky name, the idea is for this online shop to be fun for both fans and filmmakers. It sports fan film books (like mine), LEGAL fan film DVDs (they do exist!), filmmaking books and gear for making your movie. There’s a surprising amount of good stuff out there, and hopefully a lot of it is now in this store. I’ll probably add some of the many fan film-related T-shirts on the web one of these days, too.
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WHY A NEW LOOK?
This is the culmination of a long-brewing move from wordpress.com, where the blog has been hosted for the last two years, to self-hosting. Setting up WordPress 2.7 software on my site, hunting down themes and plug-ins, troubleshooting changes I ignorantly made to CSS style sheets (“If I change this number, what happens? Oops!”) and so on has been a long, tiring learning experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s all worth it; now that I’ve freed myself from constrictive hosting policies that included no plug-ins, limited widgets, a small selection of themes, and more, I’ll be able to offer a more flexible and interesting blog as time goes on.
For those who care about these things, the new blog theme is a moderately modified version of Modmat by Chris Chrisostomou. Plug-ins at work so far include Akismet, Sociable, Video Bracket Tag and WordPress.com Stats.
Anyway, take a look around the site and see what you think. I’ll be fixing and adding as I go along, so consider it a work in progress for now. All I ask is that you keep reading and enjoying the site!
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