Okay: as promised a couple of months ago on my old website – Cinephobia – I’ve completely redesigned, rethought, renamed and relaunched my website.
As I mentioned back on the old site, Cinephobia was obviously well overdue for a thorough redesign, and parts of it had actually started to break as the tools I used to build it were no longer supported. This had become an increasing issue and the thought of all the work I needed to do to bring it up to date was one of the reasons I was writing so infrequently in the last twelve months: I just couldn’t face it.
The other issue was that Cinephobia, which I launched way back in 1997, just wasn’t a good fit for what I wanted to write any more. It sort of never was, as I always wrote too intermittently for it to be a conventional film review site. However, as I have focussed more and more on other writing – most notably on urban planning – an increasing amount of my work simply hasn’t fit the nature of the page. Hence my desire to relaunch a site that was simply a personal page for all my writing (and even other stuff, such as photography). So here its: www.sterow.com.
I realise that those who have only ever known my film writing might find all this urban planning stuff just gets in the way; and even I am struck by some of the odd juxtapositions that are found on here now that I’ve uploaded all the content. However, I’m hoping that the modernisation of the site design (plus the separate menus for featured posts and film reviews) will make it easy enough to just get to the content that interests you. And while I would never recommend some of the more technical planning articles to a general audience, some I think might actually have a broader interest: my visit to the town of Seaside (where The Truman Show was filmed), for example, or my discussion of SimCity. Of course, an increasing amount of my work straddles the line between the two subject areas anyway, so hopefully many of my articles will be of interest to people on either side of that film / urban planning divide.
I probably should also add that while the front page on day one is a little “planning heavy,” there is absolutely no intention to write on film less. On the contrary, having managed to fix my website, my I should be writing about film more than I have for quite a while.
The main regret I have is that while I have migrated almost all the old content, unfortunately it wasn’t possible to bring across all the comments on articles. That is a real shame, as I had some very enlightening feedback on some posts. The good news is that such an apocalypse shouldn’t happen again, as my new page is built on systems that should be much more readily exported in the event I have to shift again.
So… thanks for your patience. Thanks also to those who gave me technical and other assistance on getting the page to this point, in particular Luke Buckmaster, who gave me some invaluable advice.
I hope you like the new site.
RIP Cinephobia (5 June 1997 – 19 November 2010).
