Screen Rant Site News

I thought you might be interested in an update on what’s going on with the site.

First off I want to congratulate the winners of the Screen Rant Suggestion contest:

“Zipper” Stevens and Andrew Phillips

They’ve each won a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate (BTW guys, let me know if you haven’t received them yet).

Zipper was the random winner and Andrew won for best suggestion(s). There were a bunch of great ones and it really helps me to know what you would like to see (or not see) here at Screen Rant.

Among Andrew’s suggestions that I thought were great:

- Get rid of the orange fade in the background color. (I’ve already done this one)

- Setting up some sort of weekly online gathering where regular visitors can get together and talk to each other real-time. (Been thinking about this but nothing happening yet)

- Movie picks that we think stand out from the currently playing films. (This means I’ll actually have to get out and see more of the movies I spend months discussing)

There was also a suggestion for a rating system for stories. Really, that’s already there but most of you don’t take advantage of it and I wish you would! At the end of each post you’ll see links to vote for a post on Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.com.

We would actually really appreciate it if you would start making use of these links to help make Screen Rant more popular, as well as to vote for posts that you really like. If I had to choose one, I’d probably select Digg.

As far as covering even more topics like video games and animation, I’m afraid that’s just not going to happen. I don’t have enough time as it is to cover current movies as well as I’d like. Also, regarding more non-sci fi and action movies: I do some coverage of those, but honestly, I’m only motivated to write about movies that I actually care about. This is more of a movie opinion site than a movie news site so I have to feel strongly about a movie whether it’s for it or against it to write about it.

Podcasts: I found it extremely difficult to do one man podcasts, and I have a newfound respect for radio talk show hosts. Maybe if I can arrange something where I can bounce stuff off of another person in the podcast I’d give it another shot.

Oh, and the random movie quotes. I’ll have a look at re-incorporating those into the site.

On a more personal note, I found it necessary to get a real 9 to 5 job recently, so if I don’t reply to emails or comments in a timely manner lately now you know why. This is requiring me to be MUCH more focused with my time since I used to surf for news to write about all day and could take my time composing an article. I’m trying my best to continue to post at least a couple of worthy items per day, but it’s gotten much harder to do.

Today I’m home sick, and since it’s impossible for me to just lay around and recuperate I’ve been tackling the recent site slowness issues. It was taking a really long time for pages to load and I managed to track down the culprit. You should notice much faster pageloads now. Also, I’ve been trying to improve the comment posting speed but I haven’t had too much luck there, I’m afraid.

That about wraps it up… If you’ve read this far, thanks!