The time has come where I’ve turned some of my attention to the antiquated parts of this web site that have been laying around since it first breathed internet life as a simple one page contact sheet over on www.michaelminetree.com

I was a late comer to the internet if you look at the fact that Ebay beat me by 6 years.
I have had to learn to code all of my pages by hand, and every now and then I get an itch to change things around. Open source code has made it possible for me to have this little internet voice over wonderland. The thought of paying a designer makes me want to cringe. However – it would certainly speed things up if I decided to bite the bullet and release control over to some stranger… Or it would invite more headaches.

So here is a list of a few things coming down the pipeline…

Probably the first thing to go is the old forum system. I haven’t ever really liked it and it’s architecture mandates that I have a vise like grip on who can join and what they can post.. So after a few years of turning away potential forum members due to restrictive policies, I’m going to switch to a more user friendly system. It should still be fun, and will follow the same vibe as the other one. Right now the forum is about as popular as a bad case of jock itch on Prom Night. Hopefully after some upgrades things will change. One thing though. When it goes – it goes… I doubt I will save any of the old posts.

The next big beast is the removal of the Geeklog system; which is the engine that runs the article portion of this site. It will be replaced with WordPress.
This CMS has served me well, but takes too much time to learn and follow up. I remember when I first put it on I went crazy for it because, at the time, it was the biggest time saving option compared to what I had before. But it has never worked right, or looked right, or been easy to manipulate from day one. Stories have to be hand coded in order to look right. I have a few stories that look like they’ve been through the ringer – and it’s just taking too much time to deal with them..

This means that I am going to have to migrate all of the content over to the new system – which will take time – but I think the world, and my brain will be better for it.

After that, is a new demo hosting page for voice talent. I’ve wanted one for a long time and I tried a while back to get together with a few people and set one up, but I didn’t like the direction it was headed in so I scrapped it. Version 2.0 is coming and it should be a lot better, as well as easy to use. It’s not intended to be “The Next Big Voice Over Database” but it won’t have any of the things that I can’t stand about the ones that are out there now. Stay posted… I’ll try to let everyone know when it’s up.

Beyond those 3 MAJOR undertakings, some other stuff will be updated – like the “God, when did you write this thing..” FAQ section. The front page has already undergone it’s facelift – soon enough I’ll turn my sights on text content…

If you have anything you would like to see – let me know.. My eyes and ears are always open…MM

***EDIT*** Most all of these things have been completed as of Sept. 08