How has my site changed over the years? Here’s a brief history.

2001: [...]]]> It’s time once again for a Mad Dog Movies re-design. Lately, I’ve been a bit tired of the Sliding Door effect for my top links… plus it doesn’t behave well with the latest WordPress iterations. So… on with the new!

How has my site changed over the years? Here’s a brief history.

2001: THE HAND

Before I ever bought maddogmovies.com or even mikeboas.com, I had a free site hosted on Tripod.  I was trying to share my resume, so to that end I created a Flash “interactive resume.”  Cute, eh?  The Animation Scoop was a cartoon news blog idea that I never did more than a dozen posts for.

2004: MIKE BOAS SITE

After getting fed up with pop-up ads at Tripod, I moved over to another free host.  Not surprisingly, service there was intermittent.  Eventually, I moved my personal site to Cyberpixels.com, where I bought legit domain names.  The site itself had a spooky sci-fi theme, with sounds and music borrowed from The Outer Limits and The Creature From the Black Lagoon. The design of these bio pages went unchanged until I re-organized the site in 2009. (This snapshot is from 2007.)

2004: THE LANDING PAGE

At this point, Mad Dog Movies was the name I gave to my network of sites.  The bio site stood on its own, and the Mad Dog Blog was a third entity.

2005: THE SMORGASBORD

As I created more websites and cartoons, the landing page became more and more crowded.   I won’t get into it here, but Almost A Movie, Subterranea, and Ominous Events also went through a few versions over the years.  Oh, and those references to the Cinematic Almanac?  That site encompassed a half dozen articles I felt (at the time) should stand on their own.  I later moved them into the blog.

2006: EL BLOGGO DEL PERRO LOCO

Meanwhile, the blog continued.  Cyberpixels became unreliable in 2005, so I moved everything over to Hostgator, where I continue to reside today. Early on, I chose the B2Evolution blog software.  A sort of competitor to WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, it later made me crazy.  

2008: Brightcove

At some point, I wanted to put more video on the landing page.  Brightcove was a cool Flash player that allowed me to do that.  Until they discontinued their free service, that is.  After that, I made due with a Youtube playlist for a while.

2008-2009: CHANGING HAIR

Over on the B2Evolution blog, I made some significant changes.  Unfortunately, I don’t have screen caps from that time, but I do have this selection of vanity headers showcasing my various haircuts.

2009: WordPress

In December of 2009, I bit the bullet and migrated from B2Evolution to WordPress.  There was some angst involved, as I didn’t want to lose all my old posts, but I managed to keep everything intact.  I also took this opportunity to combine the bio site, the blog, and the Mad Dog Movies identity all into one.  The Atahualpa theme lasted a week or two, and then I created something crazy…

2009: DARK RED SLIDING DOORS

There was something about the “Sliding Doors” theme I liked.  It had javascript-powered sliding banner links at the top of the page.  But there were other design elements in the “Dark Red” theme that I wanted, also.  So I combined the two — which was fine for a year or so.  Eventually, WordPress updates (and the lack of updates in both Sliding Doors and Dark Red) necessitated another change.

2011: PAGELINES IN PROGRESS

I burned through a ton of test themes in the last few days.  I landed on one called “Platform” from Pagelines which has a great interface for making changes.  I rarely want something straight out of the box, and I need to make changes to colors, fonts, backgrounds, and column widths.  Platform lets me do most of that without hard coding.  Here’s what it looked like yesterday.

2011: CURRENT

And today I’ve brought in my current logo and scratchy paper look.  I’d like to tighten the spacing a bit (mostly in the sidebar) but it’s pretty satisfactory.  Pagelines offers pro versions of their themes, so I might consider upgrading.

Craig’s passion is tracking the cinematic adaptations of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other weird fiction authors. Anyone making a Lovecraft film crosses paths with Unfilmable at some point. Craig feeds the hungry HPL [...]]]> I heard from Craig Mullins today that his website Unfilmable.com has been relaunched as a blog at http://unfilmable.blogspot.com

Craig’s passion is tracking the cinematic adaptations of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other weird fiction authors. Anyone making a Lovecraft film crosses paths with Unfilmable at some point. Craig feeds the hungry HPL audience by publishing photos and updates about any production, large or small. Personally, he helped me connect with the person who did French subtitles on “The Other Gods.” He also passed along the short film to artist Tom Sullivan, who reviewed it for the site.

Hopefully there will be some archived content from the old site posted in the future, but for now I’m happy to get a daily dose of strange from http://unfilmable.blogspot.com

A very beautiful animated short worth checking out, especially if you are a Lovecraft fan.

Tim posts his capsule reviews at Bastards of Horror, and has published three [...]]]> Thanks to Tim Gross, whom I met at Cleveland’s Cinema Wasteland.  He gave The Other Gods a plug in his latest newsletter, Gross Movie Reviews #139:

A very beautiful animated short worth checking out, especially if you are a Lovecraft fan.

Tim posts his capsule reviews at Bastards of Horror, and has published three books of Gross Movie Reviews to date.   Check them out on Lulu here: http://www.lulu.com/grossmoviereview

That’s what the generous Brooke from the Supernatural Things blog had to say about H. P. Lovecraft’s The Other Gods.

As far as compliments go, that’s a pretty nice one. Thanks, Brooke!

—–

In addition, Jason Olshefsky of jayceland.com had this to [...]]]> “Delicious, occult eye-candy for the darker sensibilities of the soul.”

That’s what the generous Brooke from the Supernatural Things blog had to say about H. P. Lovecraft’s The Other Gods.

As far as compliments go, that’s a pretty nice one. Thanks, Brooke!

—–

In addition, Jason Olshefsky of jayceland.com had this to say about the screening at the Little Theatre:

The films were generally very good but I particularly liked H.P. Lovecraft’s The Other Gods by Mike Boas which Mike had “restored” a formerly “lost” shadow-animation… all plausible and rather spooky, actually.

From Fanboy Theatre:

“This short is meant to fill in the gap between Firday The 13th 1 & 2 and it does just that. Using an scratchy and loose drawing style with a limited color palatte really gives [...]]]> A careful search of the internet has yielded a couple more reviews of “Jason: The Rebirth.”

From Fanboy Theatre:

“This short is meant to fill in the gap between Firday The 13th 1 & 2 and it does just that. Using an scratchy and loose drawing style with a limited color palatte really gives this film an eerie feeling, and Mr. Boas even uses actual music from the original Friday The 13th films adding more to the overall coolness of the short. Very brave, very unique, and a damn fine Fan Film. I would have liked this short to be a tad longer, but sometimes in the world of Fan Films that can become a bad thing and ruin the finished product. Nope, this one is definitely a keeper, Awesome stuff!”

And here’s some thoughts on franchise animation from VisibleH20.com:

“I found this (Jason Animation) inventive and fun. I hope that someday we will see much more animation for such works. Perhaps many such works that are awaiting new creative juices to flow, should be animated until better scripts and or creators are at hand. Take The Batman, for instance, the Cartoons continued with or without the live action movie. It took ten years or so for Batman to Return.”

Lastly, I see that “Jason” is listed with other F13 fanfilms at scabboy.net.

Peter Sciretta writes:

“The animation is better than you’d expect, with a style of its own”

TDavid writes:

“That washed out green/black texture for the fanfilm has its own dark flavor to it. This is actually much better than [...]]]> Cinematical.com has been running features on fan films lately, and “Jason: The Rebirth” made the cut.

Peter Sciretta writes:

“The animation is better than you’d expect, with a style of its own”

TDavid writes:

“That washed out green/black texture for the fanfilm has its own dark flavor to it. This is actually much better than I thought it would be.”

I suppose the trick is to keep people’s expectations really low, so they’re pleasantly surprised with the film itself…

Read the story at http://www.cinematical.com/2005/06/11/fanfilm-jason-the-rebirth