It's been a while since I last posted a blog. Over six months to be exact, when I outlined why we at Cine Outsider were abandoning the right-wing hellscape that is modern day Twitter. And yes, I continue to refuse to use that idiotic single character rebrand imposed on it by Elon Musk – it was Twitter before he came along and completely fucked it up, and I feel confident that it will be Twitter again when he has the good grace to bugger off to Mars.

So why break such a long and peaceful silence? Well, as with most previous blogs in recent years, it's because I have something significant to report. For a change, it's not illness or personal issues related. I mean, I could tell you about my ankle, which swelled up horribly a couple of weeks ago and became seriously infected after I was bitten by a spider. Not a tarantula or something equally exotic and toxic, mind you, but the regular British variety, albeit one of the larger and uglier ones. The speed and severity of the infection surprised the Urgent Treatment Centre doctor I ended up having to see, and it's been suggested that I may have, or may have recently developed, an allergic reaction to spider venom. I didn't even realise that venom was a thing with British spiders. One course of antibiotics later, the swelling has been considerably reduced, but the bite wound is still visually unpleasant and infected. I'm thus now on my second course of antibiotics and am required to revisit the surgery once a week to have the wound checked until it finally clears, which suggests it's going to be a somewhat slow process. I never again want to hear the claim that UK spiders are harmless and that my arachnophobia is irrational. But I digress.

The situation as it stands

The true reason for this blog is to once again discuss the future of Cine Outsider. More than once I've used these digital pages to ponder whether I want to keep the site going in an age when more and more people seem uninterested in reading anything longer than a tweet. Indeed, there are times when I can't help thinking that the prime function of our long form reviews is unpaid and unacknowledged trainers for the likes of Chat GPT and its ignoble ilk. I also have to acknowledge that our now small collection of writers are not quite as young as they remain in spirit. Indeed, I was recently in a position to retire from my daytime job and spend more time on reviews and home repairs, but for reasons I'm still not even sure of myself I elected to stay on for another year or so. Frankly, the amount of work that has been thrown my way since has already given me cause to seriously question the wisdom of that decision. Physical ailments aside, I definitely find writing long form reviews of the sort that we first became known for more challenging than I used to in my younger days. I find it harder to concentrate for long periods of time, make more stupid typing mistakes than I ever used to (as if to unconsciously emphasise that point, I just mistyped "stupid" as "studpid"), and get hit by a degree of writer's block at least once per review when once upon a time the words just used to flow. I can't keep trying to ignore the fact that I'm getting old and am increasingly aware that Cine Outsider can't go on indefinitely, and for reasons I'll now explain, it can't go on too much longer in its present form. Change is definitely on the horizon.

If you're new to the site and know nothing of its background and formation, then you'll find all you need to know in this article that was written by myself and my friend and fellow reviewer Camus to mark the 20th anniversary of the site's formation. The key thing here is that I started what was then DVD Outsider as a hobby and knew precious little about web design, save what I had taught myself when constructing a basic website to promote the cinema-based film society I used to co-run. I designed Outsider using software that even back then would have been considered rudimentary by anyone with a background in coding HTML, but at the time, at least, it did the job. Eventually I migrated to Adobe Dreamweaver, which I had access to through work, and which offered me more flexibility, despite leaning heavily towards HTML coding, which I had precious little interest in learning. Fortunately, the program's graphic user interface – or GUI – was competent enough to meet most of my needs. When it fell short, you could hear me screaming into the void in frustration as I tried desperately to find websites that would explain the basics of CSS code in laymen's terms. They never did. The assumption always seemed to be that if you're using Dreamweaver to build your site, you must be at the very least competent in coding. But I got by, and when I did need a new feature that was not readily available within the program, I often found example code that I could copy and drop into the HTML of the page in question. That doesn't mean I understood a single line of it, which meant that if I wanted to modify it later, I was fresh out of luck. That's the reason that font sizes and colours are not exactly consistent sitewide.

As websites evolved to be able to automatically change their layout when viewed on a tablet or phone, the restrictions of my homebrew approach really started to bite. I looked at the heavily promoted and apparently easy to use website builders such as Wix and Squarespace but discovered that they all had an unpublicised page count limit that fell way short of what I required. Then there was WordPress, apparently the most popular website builder on the market, but this meant learning a whole new way or working, and I knew that migrating the site would be a massive job that I am assured by those who know would have to be done manually on a page-by-page basis due to the unorthodox way that I built the current site in Dreamweaver. So I kept putting it off. Now the time has finally come.

The way forward

If I'm going to keep Cine Outsider ticking over and keep the thousands of reviews we have written between us available in the long term, Dreamweaver is increasingly looking to be a dead end. It's the only program in Abode's software suite (well, the only one I use) that has not received a substantial upgrade every year, and while Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator are all in their 2025 incarnations and are updated further every few months, the last substantial upgrade to Dreamweaver was back in 2021. This probably accounts for the fact that every time I begin a new session, it's only a matter of minutes before the program freezes up and crashes, usually when I'm in the middle of formatting or highlighting text. There's a real sense that Adobe is winding Dreamweaver down and that it will soon be discontinued.

As big a problem for me is that Dreamweaver is a part is of an increasingly expensive Adobe subscription model that is directly tied to my daytime job, and not something I will be able to afford when I finally elect to leave. There are some perfectly good and affordable alternatives to the big three Adobe programs that you can purchase outright, but I've found no real substitute for Dreamweaver. I'm guessing this is because almost no-one uses it to build and maintain websites anymore. Except me, of course. The clock is thus ticking on the website in its current form. So, to quote Ricky Roma from Glengarry Glen Ross, "What are you going to do about, asshole?"

Well, first up, it's become clear that despite me not having a clue about how to build a site on that platform, WordPress is going to be the way to go. It's almost completely GUI driven, creates sites that that fluidly adapt their layout for mobile phone and tablet screens, has plenty of templates to choose from that I can modify and build on to build the sort of layout that I'm aiming for, and has thousands of plug-ins to add functionality to the site, many of which are free or have cut-down free versions. Having made up my mind, I nonetheless sat on the idea for months, genuinely intimidated by having to learn a whole new way of working after two decades, and by the considerable time that it will take both to get it up and running and migrate the existing content.

After much dithering, however, it's finally under way. I added a WordPress site to my hosting account, and have registered the cineoutsider.co.uk domain name. Given that our content is now fully UK based, I've been keen to move the site from the more American .com to a co.uk suffix for some time. At present there's nothing there, save for a 'coming soon' message on the landing page and a few default links that lead absolutely nowhere. I have next week off work and plan to devote at least one day to getting to grips with the interface, finding a template to modify and build the site around, and perhaps even get the build under way. I'll post information about how the new site is progressing as I work on it, and hopefully in the coming few weeks you'll see it starting to come together. But it will take a while, and as every change I save immediately goes live, all of my progress and mistakes and mind changes will be on public display. I've bookmarked a whole ton of YouTube videos showing not only the basics of how to build a site using WordPress, but how to incorporate all of the features that I want. Frustratingly, there's not one video that encompasses them all, but collectively they seem to answer most of my questions.

The upsides and challenges of the change

Once I crack how WordPress works – and I will – there are serious advantages for me as site editor. Currently, all of the listings of reviews, whether by posting date, reviewer or media, have to be updated manually, and being a busy dude, I often forget to add new titles for weeks at a time, and occasionally even fail to include links to reviews or articles entirely. On the new site, this process should hopefully be completely automated. The front page will be simplified from its current incarnation but should still follow a similar structure, with the latest reviews and/or news stories at the top and the most recent ones listed below in posting order. Because this will be automated, I need to create a blog template and transfer some of the more recent reviews onto the new site before I work on getting the front page to list them. Thus, when the landing page starts to take shape, there should already be several reviews posted in the new format.

The review pages will all use the same template (and no, I don't know how to create templates yet), and while they will follow the current format in some respects, there is going to be some simplification. I'll no longer be posting all of the main credits for the film as I do now, as these are freely available on IMDb and other film database sites, and I will likely be restricting the credits to country of origin, year of release, running time, director, and lead actors. For practical reasons, I'll also be abandoning the sidebar and posting these credits either above or below the review in a format that has yet to be finalised.

Something that I am giving serious consideration to is adding capsule reviews that are far shorter than what has become the site norm. It's a decision born of the fact that we now have only a small number of reviewers, and with Gary working primarily (though by no means exclusively) on BFI discs, Camus focussed on cinema releases, and Jerry specialising in the London Film Festival, the rest of the review discs end up on my plate, and there are way more than I could possibly cover in my usual depth. To give you an idea, 16 new discs landed on my doormat last week alone. Given that I still have a full-time job, like to swim in the evening and am getting just a little doddery, how many of those do you think I can cover at my usual length? If I was able to reign it in a bit and write some shorter reviews that briefly summarise the plot and my views on the film in three or four concise paragraphs, as well as providing brief details of the special features and technical specs, it would at least allow me to cover more titles than I presently do, which would also be fairer to the distributors who send us the discs in the first place.

One issue I will have to solve and don't yet have an answer for revolves around the process of migration past reviews and articles. If the front page automatically lists the most recent posts as planned, then every time I transfer an old DVD review to the new site it will pop up in the front page as a new review by default, despite the fact that it could be up to 20 years old. I'm sure there's a solution, one I'll likely unearth when I find my feet and start digging into the finer workings of WordPress. I've a lot to learn, and it's highly likely that once the site goes live, it will undergo a series of changes and improvements as I fine tune elements and make small tweaks to its look and functionality. The long-term aim is to migrate the entire site to the new location over the course of the next couple of years, then cineoutsider.co.uk will become the default location for the site. Once that process is complete, cineoutsider.com will be quietly retired.