Site conversion is underway

As of 8:09 CST this morning, the old 8sails is gone. As I mentioned last month on the 8sails Facebook feed, I'm giving priority to the College section so my students will have everything they need for class. Once that's done, I'll begin the long – and I do mean long – process of redoing the rest of the site.

I appreciate everyone's patience while I continue working on the conversion. Naturally I still have all the old content saved, so if you're in dire need of any of it let me know and I'll dig it up for you.

Thanks.

Site conversion

It's time for 8sails to get an upgrade. More precisely, I'm going to switch to a new system for organizing the site and creating pages. I've been using Dreamweaver, but Adobe's new Muse system has caught my eye. It provides a lot more design flexibility, and it's just generally a lot easier to use.

However, I can't simply load the old site into the new software. That's an advantage, because I've found that often starting over from scratch is easier than adapting old work. Unfortunately it's also a disadvantage, because we're talking about thousands of pages. Literally.

In order to avoid making the challenge more daunting than it already is, I'm going to stop uploading new pages. Overall this shouldn't have too much effect on the "user experience." But it does mean that I won't be adding new movie reviews to the site for awhile.

Because reviews are one of 8sails' more popular features, I'm going to blog them here on The Octopus as I write them.

New on the site

Faithful readers know the drill. It’s been months since I posted new reviews. But recently I’ve had a productive spurt. This probably isn’t all the movies I’ve seen for the last six months, but it’s all the ones I remember seeing. The rest ... well, if they were less memorable than this set, perhaps the lack of reviews is for the best.

• Gone Girl 
• Tucker and Dave vs. Evil
• The Beast (1988)
• Jupiter Ascending
• The Book of Life
• Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
• 12 Years a Slave
• Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
• The Boxtrolls
• Big Hero 6
• How to Train Your Dragon 2
• Willow Creek 
• The Houses October Built
• Django Unchained
• Wild
• Edge of Tomorrow
• Dracula Untold
• San Andreas
• Inherent Vice
• Ouija
• American Sniper
• The Purge: Anarchy
• Inside Out
• Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie
• Hercules (2014)

Fortunately recent reads were generally better:

• Wild 
• Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
• Finders Keepers
• Blank Spots on the Map
• The Scarlet Gospels

Getting caught up

It’s been so long since I posted content to 8sails that Dreamweaver (the app I use to manage the site) has undergone significant and not entirely welcome revisions in the interim.

Needless to say, there’s a lot.

New in movies:

• Admission
• American Hustle
• (500) Days of Summer
• How to Train Your Dragon
• The Last Days of Patton
• Tim’s Vermeer
• Ghosts at Sea
• 13th Child: Jersey Devil
• Doctors of the Dark Side
• The Heat
• Blended
• The Poisoner’s Handbook
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Oculus
• The Monkey’s Paw (2013)
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier 
• Beauty Is Embarrassing
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2 
• The Wind Rises
• The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies
• Noah 
• Project Almanac
• Houdini
• The Giver
• Burton and Taylor
• Fury
• The Imitation Game
• Leprechaun: Origins 
• Dracula Untold 
• Nightcrawler 
• Mr. Turner

And in books:

• A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling
• Revival
• Secret Windows
• Old Friend From Far Away

New this week - A lot of bad movies

And last week. And the week before. They weren’t all terrible. Just most of them.

• Pacific Rim
• The Croods 
• Iron Man 3 
• Man of Steel  
• Carrie (2013) 
• Augustus 
• Last Stand 
• The Lone Ranger 
• Emperor 

On the brighter side, I finished reading a good book: Photojojo!

New this week - Metamorphoses

Not a ton of new content this week. Indeed, the only movie I saw was I, Frankenstein, noteworthy only because it’s the first time in awhile that I’ve made it to a movie theater.

However, fans of The Metamorphoses Project will be happy to note that I finally managed to add the content from last year (both spring and fall). The project is now up to 23 images (four of which are my creations).

A first from 8sails Press

Like most kids, I wanted to be any number of things when I was a kid. Superhero. Commando. Astronaut. Of course I had a few more down-to-earth ambitions as well. Engineer (not good enough at math). Computer programmer (no patience for it). Architect (see Engineer and Programmer).

The one childhood fascination that stuck with me was writing. Of course this infatuation evolved a bit over the years. Thanks to my love of novels and short stories, I originally saw myself as an author of fiction. I first set foot on that path at 16 when I got a short story published in a small press anthology.

And then nothing. Though I’ve written fiction off and on for the last three decades, I’ve published none of it. Until now.

A couple of days ago, 8sails Press published a novella I first drafted several years ago and recently managed to edit and compose for Kindle distribution. Writing it was great entertainment. I even had fun designing the cover. So I hope readers will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

The official description: Sarah Upton and her parents are headed to the small fishing village of Innsmouth for a funeral. Before journey’s end, she’ll learn more than she ever wanted to know about her family, her heritage and the darker corners of the earth.

Fans of the work of H.P. Lovecraft will recognize a name or two in there. My story is a modern re-thinking of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” Though the novella contains a few references to the original story, you can enjoy it fully even if you’re unfamiliar with the source.

Thanks to an agreement with Amazon, this title is available only for the Kindle. In exchange for this restriction, the retailer is providing some marketing assistance. If you don’t actually have a Kindle device, fear not. Amazon makes Kindle apps available for free for a range of computers, tablets and smart phones.

And yes, the company also makes me charge for it. However, the price is an affordable 99 cents. My royalty is 35 cents per copy, so if you buy the book and don’t like it, I’ll personally refund the 35 cents you gave me and you can go out and buy yourself a nothing.

If you’re not inclined to mess with the whole Kindle thing, you can still read the first few pages on Amazon.

2012 - Some final housekeeping

At the start of 2012 I set two goals for 8sails, making one and falling just a tad short on the other.

The one I missed: adding 1000 new pages to the site. I figured with all the Survival Guide uploading at the start of the year that I might stand a chance of making it. Though that contributed an even 400 new pages, I still finished the year at 909 (including blog entries). Still, that’s an average of more than four per working day. Not too bad.

My other goal was to shoot more than 10,000 pictures, a mark I managed to clear with 80 to spare. The next big 8sails College project is going to be a photography text, and I need to replace the examples of other photographers’ work that I used to use in class with self-created demonstrations that could be uploaded to the web without violating copyright laws. My collaborator and I still have a ways to go, but we’re off to a good start.

Right before Christmas I also wrote the site’s 4000th movie review. When I hit 3000, I took a look back at what I’d reviewed. That was easier then than it is now, because back then I had a database of all the reviews allowing me to count the number of horror movies, comedies, dramas and so on. The database bit the dust in a hard drive crash, and I haven’t cared enough about it to rebuild the thing. So the view from 4000 is only “wow, that’s a lot of movies.”

Other than work on The Photographer’s Sketchbook, I haven’t set any goals for 2013. I’m going to let the year go wherever it takes me.

Survival Guide update

I promised myself (and y’all as well, whether you knew it or not) that I wasn’t going to clog the blog with a bunch of updates on Survival Guide progress. As I’m getting at least a little done almost every day, it would become a daily thing to keep up with it, boring everyone in the process.

But this week I hit a couple of big moments. As of this writing, the first four chapters are available online. And more than that, the first eight chapters (i.e. half the book) are available in “beta test” format as a PDF. You can check “the herd” for access to the online chapters, and you can download the PDF edition from 8sails Press.

A scary moment

Just a couple of minutes ago, I completed the last of the structural work on the Media Survival Guide. From here I have three more chapters to finish researching, and after that it’s all writing (and web page building of course). So that’s three “feature length” chapters and five shorter “specialty” chapters to go.

For the first time The Project seems like it might actually have an end.