Saturday, September 30, 2017

Who’ll turn out the lights (in your world tonight)


It’s the last day of September in 2017, and tomorrow (October 1), Thrilling Days of Yesteryear will officially move to its new home at WordPress.  If you make it a point to stop by in an ever-so-casual fashion, you’ll notice that there’s been quite a bit of activity taking place at the blog’s new home; a little over 600 posts both old and new have already settled in and made themselves comfortable by calling dibs on the bunks.

Since switching from Salon Blogs (a venture that, in retrospect, I regret…because I have nothing to show for it, unless I want to fire up archive.org’s Wayback Machine) to Blogspot nearly a decade ago, I have to say things were pretty swell here.  Oh, occasionally there would be a minor problem to iron out but such inconveniences were few and far between.  To be completely honest, except for the Herculean task of transferring the content from old to new blogs, I’ve really been impressed with the look of the new WordPress TDOY.  I like the big pictures that start off each post, something that I have developed an infinity for since I started penning the Radio Spirits blog in May of 2012.  You’ll find that more than a few “classic” TDOY posts have spiffy new presentations in pictures; that’s what I have been enjoying about the transfer the most.

During my stay here at Blogspot, I racked up over 3,000 posts.  A large percentage of those…well, I never was all that good at math but let’s just say a buttload of them were “meat by-product.”  I posted a lot of personal rants, comic strips, and political cartoons back in those days…and they have not aged at all well, so I vetoed bringing them over to WordPress.  They have been released into the wilds of the blogosphere or taken upstate to romp around on someone’s farm (unless the material I posted had some relevance afterward in the post).  I’ve also erased many of the TV-coming-to-DVD announcements, Coming Distractions, and notifications of movies/TV shows on sale because, again, all of that was in the past and it’s not going to do anyone any good now (I’m betting a lot of that stuff has expired).  What’s past isn’t always prologue, I suppose.

I’ll be leaving a few items at the old Blogspot apartment for a while until I can figure out how I want to work them into the WordPress environs, namely the serials I did for Serial Saturdays and two of the blog’s signature features, Mayberry Mondays and Doris Day(s).  In the case of Mayberry, I’d like to go back and do some new screen grabs for the first season episodes seeing as I still have Season 1 of Mayberry R.F.D. on DVD.  (I want to go back and do screen caps for some of the older serials, too.)  So, if you get an R.F.D. jones, you’ll need to use the key I’m leaving under the mat…if you get a Google Chrome message that reads “Don’t play in that old house or you’ll put your eye out” I don’t know what to tell you.

At the WordPress blog…well, there’ll be a change or two in the works.  For a time now, I’ve set aside days for certain features: Overlooked Films on Tuesdays, B-Western Wednesdays, silent movies on Thursdays, etc.  I think that with the exception of Overlooked Films the new TDOY policy will be “I’ll-write-about-this-movie-whenever-I-darn-well-please.”  I’m really hoping to boost the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly content of TDOY once I get settled in, and if I’m not tied into a whole “Gee, I’d like to post something about this film but it’s out-of-sync with what usually goes here” thing it’ll work out for me so much better.

With all that out of the way, let me step inside the confessional and own up to this: the post I had planned for Monday is going to be postponed for a day or two because I’m still making my way through the material; I didn’t get a doggone thing accomplished after Tuesday of last week due to deadlines for other projects and outside irritations.  I’m really going to get better at a regular posting schedule, so if you’ll just hand me my ten Hail Marys I’ll be out of your hair.

Thanks for making the Blogspot Thrilling Days of Yesteryear one of your usual haunts…and I hope you’ll do the same for our new home at WordPress.  If you haven’t updated our new address on your blogroll, please do so as a solid to me.