Right, the day has finally arrived. I'll be honest and admit that it's come earlier than I originally expected (or should that be feared?), and probably earlier than it logically should, but the decision has been made and there's no going back now. Today, cineoutsider.com officially becomes cineoutsider.co.uk, and the new, WordPress based co.uk site will, from this day forward, be where I will be exclusively posting all new reviews, articles and news stories. As a result, this blog will be the last piece that I will be posting on both platforms. You can find it over at https://cineoutsider.co.uk.

First up, it's important to note that the cineoutsider.com site is not going anywhere, at least not for the immediate future. We've been around for over 20 years now in one form or another and a quick peek at the review archives will reveal just how monumental the task of moving the older reviews over to the new site is going to be. Even before I began work on the new site I had no illusions about how long this would take, and originally estimated at least a couple of years, and I see no reason to doubt that. Thus, the .com site will remain as an archive of previously posted reviews, articles, news stories and blogs until the process of transferring the older material is complete.

I'll admit that the new site is still some way from completion. I have yet to set up archive pages or a search landing page (both are currently in progress), and because of this the top menu bar is currently devoid of links, but they will be added once the archive pages start to go live. I've learned a hell of a lot about both WordPress and the Elementor plugin since I started this project, but despite that, some manually maintained features that visitors might take for granted on the old site are proving tough nuts to crack with automation on the new one. Principally amongst these is the ability to separate review listings into alphabetic groups (imagine having to press the "next" button 50 times to browse the reviews that start with the letter S) and the inability to alphabetically list titles in a way that ignores the first word of ones that start with "The" "A" or "An," which results in The Hireling being listed under "T" instead of "H". Conquering this may require me to learn some CSS code, which is currently not a high priority for me. But I'll get there, eventually.

So if the new site is still not fully functional yet, why am I implementing the changeover now? It's a case of simple pragmatics. The front page is now fully functioning and the review templates are all set, and every page so far seems to also function well on mobile devices. For the past couple of weeks I've been dual posting reviews and news stories on the old and the new site, and given that these both take time to lay out, I'm effectively doubling my workload here. This, and the considerable time I've been spending knocking the new site in to shape, means I've been once again neglecting the reviews that are supposed to be Cine Outsider's prime raison d'être, and the review discs are really piling up. The final nail came in the shape of my now restricted acces to Dreamweaver, on which the old site was maintained, whereas I can access the new site on any device with a web browser.

Thus from now on, while the old site will remain to facilitate access to older reviews and articles while we slowly migrate them to their new location, all new reviews, news stories, articles, blogs and interviews will be posted on the new site alone. As I noted above, some pages are still under construction but should be available soon, and there will doubtless be plenty of tinkering with the current layout and functionality of site in general, including, hopefully, the addition of some of the above-mentioned features that the site currently lacks.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience during the transition, and any feedback or useful tips are always welcome.