greybean.com

Okay, kids, here it finally is. This site has been aching for the assistance of a content management system for, literally, years longer than there has been such a thing. So, now it has one.

Welcome, officially, to greybean.com v4.5 lite. I’m leaving the ‘lite’ moniker attached despite the fact that this site is already much more richly concentrated with information than it’s ever been. It just doesn’t have the same sort of useless bells and whistles that it has in the past.

The site is powered by WordPress, an open source, and very powerful, CMS. Its look, feel and functionality are based on Michael Heilemann’s incredibly popular Kubrick theme. Expect the look of the site to change semi-frequently over the next few weeks or months as I learn more about WordPress, Kubrick, PHP and CSS. I’ll put up a more detailed colophon in the very near future.

So, what does all of this really mean?

Well, it means—and I think I can say this with a reasonable amount of confidence—that this site is going to be updated an order of magnitude more often. Even without full, proper posts I’ll be adding links to trailers and movie sites and other crap I’m looking at over in the sidebar on the front page. Of particular interest will be the ‘clippings’ section. That’s where I’ll put little bits of interesting things that I find around the web such as the 10-minute featurette about Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Sin City that’s there now. That movie looks pretty freaking amazing. I hope I’m not disappointed by it. But, anyway, I’m getting off the track here…

So, right, more frequent updates and, I swear, for the first time in the history of this site (and its now very numerous incarnations) it will actually be a fully integrated grey[and]bean.com. She’ll be able to very easily add her own ten or twenty-five cents right there on the front page and I’m gonna badger her into doing so with a certain amount of regularity. Oh, and, not only that, but, all of the three or four of you who are reading this have the option now to comment on the crap we say on here. Directly below the title of each post is the date and time that it was published. Directly to the right of that is a link to the ‘comments’ area for that post. (On each post’s own page—like this one—the comment section is right at the bottom of the page and very hard to miss.) Feel free to add your own two cents at will. Even—especially, in fact—if it’s just to point how stupid we are for one reason or another.

Oh, and also, as I had said might happen, we’ve switched hosts. greybean.com and all of its related domains and subdomains (including the one you’re on right now: lite.greybean.com) are now proudly hosted by DreamHost. If any of that means anything to you, you should definitely check them out.

Ahh, so, I’m pretty satisfied with this whole thing. Welcome.

Quickly, before I go: yes, the inside cover art for the Criterion Collection’s DVDs of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is freaking awesome as I had expected it would turn out to be:

Browsing around for that artwork led me to find some other pretty awesome future Criterion artwork as well:

That Three War Movies one is particularly excellent.

Anyway, so, here it is. Check back often, dammit.