Goodbye forums, hello blogs

I have long considered changing over from the forum structure to a more trendy weblog. When I set up the Mad Dog Message Boards in the summer of 2004, I had several reasons for going that way.

1) I like being able to post multiple times on the same topic, with the thread remaining in chronological order. That is, with the first post at the top, then the second, etc.

2) It would be relatively easy to set up several categories for posts, all under the Mad Dog Banner. One forum for random stuff, one for Subterranea news, one for Almost A Movie posts, with the possibility of adding more.

3) Visitors could take part in conversations, not just comment on an entry.

There were drawbacks, however. Since I was pretty much the only one posting, the forum structure looked kind of silly. My image was next to every post, and it came off like an exercise in narcissism.

It became increasingly difficult to read my website stats. Search engines were working overtime crawling through the thousands of little forum generated dead end pages. (I’m not sure if this situation will improve with a blog, though.)

So as I considered a changeover to blogging, lightning struck. Cyberpixels, my webhost, had some sort of catastrophic failure last week and my site went down. They assured me they’d correct the problem, but after 3 days they stopped answering my polite emails. I’m now starting over with Hostgator.

Since I lost the message board, I’m starting from scratch with the all new Mad Dog Blogs. I’ll be able to reconstruct some things, like the Subterranea section. Most other posts were pretty much expendable, fortunately.

Welcome to a new experience in narcissism!