Today is the day that my much-planned upgrade of Pulpmovies is going ahead. It’s taken the best part of a month to get everything in place and now, as I type this, I’m watching the old version of the site being steadily trashed.
I started the process a bit later than intended and it looks like my downtime estimate was optimistic simply becasue of the sheer number of files to be deleted. I won’t have everything up by lunchtime, but nor have I encountered any problems… yet.
After ten years without a car, I have wheels again. And here they are…
Yes, I am playing around with WordPress themes again. None is ideal – as yet – but the process is giving me a fair bit of food for thought.
Today, after exactly ten years and three months with the same employer, I’m moving on. There have been some interesting times over the past decade but recent restructuring has left me in a position where I am now enduring a great deal of frustration and no sense of satisfaction. I struggled on with this for a few months, more out of a sense of inertia than anything else, but as 2009 came to a close it was painfully apparent that the role I was in was going nowhere.
I started looking around to see what else was available. It’s taken a couple of months but it turns out that what else was available includes a job description copied and pasted from my CV – literally.
And now, on my last day here, I find myself sitting here looking at the last few bits and pieces that need to be finished off – and the fact that I am writing this blog post at 10:00am can be taken as an indication of just how little outstanding work I have.
20/20 hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing and there are plenty of things I could have done differently and several points over the past decade where I would probably have done better to move on than stick things out. But, on the whole, I have achieved a lot – including a Merchandise Management environment that needs almost no out of hours support and very little support during office hours. And even if I do say so myself, I can build some bloody stable interfaces – something that has been underlined to me over the past year of watching other people building other interfaces.
Looking forward, there is some preparation that I need to do and the new job will involve a bit of a commute. But it also offers a bucketload of opportunities to consolidate and grow along the technical lines that I both enjoy and am good at. Obviously, there will be much to learn and new irritations along the way but the change ogf job has provided me with a much needed opportunity to consider the direction I want to take my career and this job offers much to support that.
So, as I look back over the past and look forward at where I’m going…
I feel good.
Over the past ten years, Pulpmovies has grown and changed several times. Originally, the site contained reviews for whatever I happened to be watching, all of which were hand-carved from raw HTML. As time progressed, I put together a rudimentary content management system for the site before abandoning this in favour of a WordPress driven solution. However, because of the organic way in which the site has grown, this has been implemented as multiple instances of WordPress strapped together with a bit of SQL. This approach works, but it has left me having to spend much more time keeping the software up to date than I would like. So it’s time for a change.
I am planning to convert the site so that it runs on a single instance of WordPress. I did take a look around to see what other content management systems were out there but I’m not really doing enough with the site to justify a bigger or more complex solution.
I have a pretty clear idea of how I want the site to look, although I still need to build a theme that will achieve this.
The WordPress database itself looks pretty simple, so merging the instances into a single one should be pretty straightforward. This is, however, somthing that will need a fair bit of testing to make sure that everything works.
And then I will need to decide what to do about the forum…
Of course, doing all this will need to be fitted in with everything else I get up to in my own time so don’t expect any sudden changes. But it won’t be too long before Pulpmovies is running on a vanilla implementation of WordPress, and I will be able to spend a lot less time upgrading software and blacklisting spammers.
The Varga girls are staying, though.
There’s only two posts in me and I just wrote the third
Don’t know where I got the inspiration or how I wrote the words
Spent my whole life just digging up my blogging’s shallow grave
For the two posts in me and the third one I just made
A rich man once told me
“hey life’s a funny thing”
A poor man once told me
That he can’t afford to speak
Now I’m in the middle like a bird without a beak ’cause
There’s just two posts in me and I just wrote the third
Don’t know where I got the inspiration or how I wrote the words
Spent my whole life just digging up my blogging’s shallow grave
For the two posts in me and the third one I just made
So I went to the president
And I asked old what’s-his-name
Has he ever gotten writer’s block
Or something like the same
He just started talking
Like he was on tv
“if there’s just two posts in ya, boy
Whaddaya want from me? ”
So I bought myself some denim pants
And a silver guitar
But I politely told the ladies
“you’ll still have to call me sir
Because I have to keep my self-respect
I’ll never be a star
Since there’s just two posts in me
And this is number three”
With apologies to They Might Be Giants
So what, you may ask, is this blog all about. The short answer, of course, is blogging.
For a slightly longer answer, you would need to head over to Pulpmovies.com, where I talk about, review and plug independent and low-budget films. Pulpmovies has been running for very near ten years and I have pretty much settled upon what the site is about and what sort of stuff I want to post and promote over there. But that leaves me with a problem, namely everything else.
For one thing, I can be quite opinionated at times and my interests often run in directions that really don’t fit into a film website. This site, then, is a seperate space on the net where I can – and will – chunter on any and every subject that catches my interest.
If what I say catches your interest as well, please do weigh in in the comments. If it doesn’t, well, you’re probably normal.
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