Every year I make some big changes to the blog, and it is again that time of year!
Changes are a part of life, and they are a part of this blog. I’ve made plenty of changes since I first started Bill’s Movie Emporium with my review of 2001: A Space Odyssey back in December of 2008. The blog looks a lot different than it did back then, and this year I’ve made even more changes to the look of the blog. To keep things simple, this State of the Emporium Address will be presented in bullet point style,
–I’ve brought back the tagging system. For a while I wasn’t using any tags in any of my posts. I thought they made the general look of each post, and especially the home page, too clunky and cluttered. However, the more I thought about it the more I realized that tags would help others to access my site in a way that only using categories could not accomplish. I also realized that the reason the tags were so clunky the last time I used them was because I used way too many tags. This time out I’ve kept the tags to a minimum, focusing only on genres (certain subgenres), country of origin, decade of release, whether it’s an adaptation (and the source material it is adapting), sequel, prequel, remake, and so forth. There’s a new tag widget along the right hand task pane, and hopefully this will be a helpful tool for all of my readers.
–I’ve added Country of Origin categories. I realized that I’m someone who is always referencing the country of origin for a film. I care if a film is from Canada, Sweden, South Korea, or Peru. To that end I went back through every review I have ever posted and I added the country of origin for all of said films.
–I decided to go through all of the pages I have (Projects, Marathons, etc.) and change the way the links worked. My wife was kind enough to tell me that it was cumbersome to click on a link and have it appear in the place of the page a person was currently reading. Therefore in a simple move I’ve made it where whenever a reader clicks on a link on this blog it will open in a new page. That way you can open the link and keep reading the post where the link originated from.
–I’ve added a new column in the form of Retro Week In Cinema. Basically, I want Bill’s Movie Emporium to be the one stop shop for all of my film reviews. There are quite a few capsule reviews floating around the internet that I wrote back when I was a frequent contributor to various message boards in the late 2000s. I’m going through and slowly gathering all of those capsule reviews and will be releasing five of them a week in the Retro Week In Cinema column. I am editing the reviews for grammar, spelling, and the like. However, any review you see in Retro Week In Cinema will represent my thoughts from when I wrote said review. My thoughts on a given film, film theory, actor, etc. may have changed since I wrote the capsule review, but I want to preserve the capsule review in its original form. Also, some capsule reviews will be very short, like one sentence short. It wasn’t until around 2010 when I began to formulate a specific length I liked in all of my capsule reviews.
–I went and added entries on the Projects page for all of the reviews I have written for other websites. If you scroll through the Projects page you’ll see listings for all the films I have reviewed in my ongoing Wide World of Horror column for Sound on Sight. You’ll also find links to a handful of reviews I wrote for the now defunct website, SecondViews.
There will be more changes coming to Bill’s Movie Emporium. Some will be coming soon, others will only come to fruition as I realize that I need them. One specific upcoming change that I can talk about is that at some point in the next few months I am planning on purchasing a domain for Bill’s Movie Emporium and leaving the .wordpress part of the web address behind. No matter what changes may come, no matter how I try to improve the blog, I can promise a few things. I will continue to write high quality reviews for this blog, I will never shy away from expressing any of my opinions on film, and I will do all I can to make Bill’s Movie Emporium as enjoyable of a destination as I can for all of my readers. Until it’s time for the next State of the Emporium Address, keep watching movies and reading what I say about them, because that makes me happy!
Cheers,
Bill
Bill's Movie Emporium 