Audio dramas, fan films, movies… why are they in my episode guide!?

Once upon a time, everything on theLogBook.com had its own section – new video games, old video games, new video games based on old video games, soundtrack music, non-soundtrack music, audio dramas, books, DVDs, movie reviews, the TV episode guide, my sock drawer… it was kinda nuts. If you’ve been around long enough, you might remember this menu from the top of nearly every page:

theLogBook.com Menu

…which, by today’s standards, is a crazily-stacked sandwich of a menu. 16 different sections!? Wow. When I decided to try out WordPress for my personal blog in 2005, I quickly realized that this was how I needed to be doing the whole site. Over the next couple of years, in and around adding new content, I set out to transfer almost all of the content from the original HTML pages to a bunch of WordPress-driven sections.

I also decided to start reducing the number of sections. Different areas of the site for soundtracks and non-soundtrack music? Silly. Three different video game sections? Even sillier. It was time to start trimming the fat. And it’s a good thing that this work was undertaken when it was: a mere two years later, my first child came along. It’s safe to say that if it hadn’t been for the WordPress conversion – allowing me to worry less about tweaking the site’s structure constantly and worry more about just writing content – theLogBook.com probably would’ve vanished from the ‘net in 2007 or 2008.

Fast forward a few years. With the need to worry about hand-coding every page, every article, eliminated, the site has at least doubled in size. Almost every section has grown… well, except for that section about new video games, the budget for which languished after there was a child to feed and clothe. And the DVD section came to a standstill for much the same reason at around the same time (never mind the fact that digital delivery has beaten the notion of a DVD review section to the finish line). Going out to see movies? Ha! Not in the budget, bucko. These sections died on the vine.

In the past year, all of the video game sections have been combined into a single section. The DVD reviews section is dormant, an archive seciton that doesn’t grow.

This year, I took the decision to move theLogBook.com’s still-not-entirely-Wordpressed Movie Reviews section over into the episode guides. They share real estate and reside in a single database. They were always formatted in much the same way anyway – it was a natural fit. The same was true of the Fan Film Reviews, which were heavily tied to franchises like Star Trek and Doctor Who anyway. TheatEar, theLogBook.com’s audio theater guide, has also begun that move, folding its content into the episode guide section.

This consolidation, however, has made the former episode guide section – now simply named The LogBook, after the original collection of ASCII text files that started this whole endeavour back in 1989 – a far more interesting place. You can search for a single actor, writer, director or composer across several media. The movies, fan films and audio dramas have been moved to their original premiere dates, providing useful context – a snapshot of the multimedia science fiction landscape at any given point in time. New stuff is being added all the time.

There’s also some logistical reasons for the consolidation that’s taking place. Fewer databases mean our database server isn’t moving like a turtle swimming through peanut butter. It also means fewer databases to back up, and fewer databases to worry about getting corrupted.

I’ve also tried to make it incredibly easy to discern what kind of media you’re looking up. An example across a single franchise below shows you, from left to right: television, theatrical films, and audio drama.

Star Wars Star Wars Star Wars

All of this helps make what was once simply a TV section a handy little pop culture research tool. (If you win a bar bet because of this site, you owe me 10%.)

The site is now consolidated down to six main sections (the LogBook, Music Reviews, Phosphor Dot Fossils, the Forum, Book Reviews and ToyBox) with two sections that are really more to do with me than with the site (my blog and podcast). Don’t worry, I don’t think it can be consolidated any further from here.

With all of that being said, welcome back to The LogBook. Just the LogBook. It all started as a bunch of information in one place, back in the BBS days, and it worked pretty good then, so somehow it just seems right.

Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster