rickroll killed the radio star
And so we're back on air then. Well, not air. We are on air. But not here, not today. Um...yeah. Video Killed The Radio Star is out for it's 2009 airing and before we get on to the nitty gritty of what's in this week's issue, let's actually work out what's changed.
For a start, the idea of the "issue". Each Sunday we are going to be putting around three or four articles online in a much more lovingly-put together magazine-esque format. At our peak that's our optimum output anyway so little will change there, and I just feel that it's a format thats original, suits our needs and suits the needs of readers who perhaps don't want to check things all of the time.
This also allows for "special" issues (such as this weeks) and just gives us a tad more freedom to do, er, this. In addition to the idea of issues I've also spruced up the website just a tad (which means a total redesign and a totally new content management backend system - movable type if you're asking) but that stuff's a bit boring and not really overly relevant in all due honesty. If you really are interested in it then underneath the important stuff below I've written about the site, the changes and what plans have been laid in place for the future.
So on to "issue 001" (i appreciate that when we get to 999 problems begin, but you know what I'll be like 100 then so it's not really something i'm overly concerning myself with) and this week we've decided to start off with, well, what can only be described as one of the all-time classic albums - no other has spawned so many huge mega-hit singles, so really it can only be ripe for parody.
1. Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
2. Baby Be Mine
3. The Girl is Mine
4. Thriller
5. Beat It
6. Billie Jean
7. Human Nature
8. PYT (Pretty Young Thing)
9. The Lady In My Life
If all that glorious, glorious "joy" is not enough to sate your appetite (in all fairness we haven't really posted much since the summer so I mean if you have some unhealthy addiction bordering on the stalk-y) and you find yourself hating this year's helping of christmas music (which, incidentally and save for a grossly misjudged version of Halleluljia (SPELLING), is the same as that of EVERY OTHER YEAR) then you can have a look at our twelve days of christmas special from last year wherein we looked at twelve christmas songs over, er, a twelve day period. Perhaps not the most original of concepts but, er, bah humbug and all that lovely, lovely stuff.
Anyway, this is where I'd recommend that you get off this voyage of satire really - have a lovely rest-of-christmas season and an even better new year, and check back next Sunday for issue 002 (we hope).
Lots of love,
Tom x
the boring stuff
1. The Design - well obviously it's a brand new design, and I feel anyway the best this site has seen by a long way. It's simple and compliacted at the same time, and I feel it brings some new ideas to the table. Is that too much to ask for?
2. The Structure - Before the site had quite a lot of unnecessary pages which were probably never looked at - while I like the idea of having a website with a lot of hidden gems, I've come to realise that the time I spend on these things just isn't worth it and a such we just have a flat navigation structure with a few basic supplementary pages where required, and when I have the time to do some nifty javascript these will hopefully become superfluous and redundant. Here's to hoping anyway...
3. The CMS - It's a weird one this, but basically I've switched from wordpress to movable type. Don't get me wrong I think wordpress is absolutely brilliant but the only reason I switched from MT to WP was because MT became corporate and stopped being open source, and at the time wordpress was (and to be fair, still is) an exciting open source development with a massive community, massive support and getting better with every version. But to me wordpress feels like the adolescent while MT feels like the fully grown beast; there's so much more you can do with it, so much more in the way of security, interaction and majorly, static pages - something which I genuinely do prefer to database determined systems in terms of flexibility and all that. Plus its nice to have a change and all that...
4. The Issue - Well, this is just a whim really, but one which I think could suit the lifestyles of myself and david much better than a rolling blog. We'll see how it goes though, plans are in place in case this system falls on it's arse - but let's not indulge in any pre-emptive reporting eh?
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