Last thing first: in about 15 seconds, I added a search box to every page of the site. This is thanks to the magic of my hosting and CMS solution. This has been a dream so far. If only I could batch edit posts...
For the longest time, Arthouse Cowboy didn't have commenting enabled because the Movable Type backend of Hollywood Elsewhere was too delicate a thing for me to monkey with very much for fear of incurring the wrath of El Jefe Jeff. I liked not having to comb through the loads of comment spam that Jeff would deal with every day on the site's front page. I liked just posting my stuff. Then I added comments to every post, and I felt like some posts (like this one) felt lonely with no comments.
I decided that I want to selectively enable/disable comments on a post-by-post basis relative to the content. In particular, when I post links to other sites, appending a little commentary of my own, I may disable in the interest of driving you to that other site to comment on the conversation.
That reminds me of how much I hate that most of the movie/TV/entertainment writing out there is just crass aggregation at this point.
I coined "The Blogger Centipede" as the name for a SXSW panel that I was supposed to moderate a couple of years ago. The whole reason I wanted to do the thing was to dig into how the entertainment blogging game has turned into a first-to-post, fastest-to-repost, ULTRA-MEGA-EXCLUSIVE race that drives me and many others nuts.
Many "major" sites across the net are virtually undistinguishable and lack an individual voice that was once their pride and selling point. They may have enormous traffic numbers, but those stats can be a very fleeting thing. Say what you will about Harry at Ain't It Cool, but his site and his posts still carry his unmistakable mark.
To this day, I get ragged on by colleagues for ever having written at Hollywood Elsewhere, their hatred of Jeff Wells is so great. Whatever differences of opinion or personality incompatibilities people (myself included at times) may have with him, he never pretends to be anyone but Jeff Wells.
I wish we valued individuality the way that we once did. I wish it weren't considered acceptable practice to paraphrase someone else's story, citing unnamed "sources" (when actually swiping the story), and then include a nearly-invisible attribution link at the bottom.
That last thing happened in a pretty high-profile way the other day when Instapaper creator Marco Arment caught and reported a massive iOS App Store corruption bug and reported it on his site, Marco.org. Countless major tech news sites ripped him off, and dear dark lord Cthulu...he called every single one of them on it on Twitter (example). He discusses the whole App Store corruption thing on this week's episode of Build and Analyze, a show I listen to every week.
There was a time when I tried to shoehorn my content into the various shapes that were popular or successful on every other site on the net. It was always too much work for content about which I cared so little that I hated doing this thing that I'm supposed to like.
Thanks to the couple hundred of you that have been reading since yesterday. Tell your friends if you think they'll dig what I'm doing.