It's already the middle of January. Atlanta was hit with bitter cold and snow and I'm ready for a little bit of warmth.
We've been busy shipping Vulcan Shuttles in the Hobbyshop. The reissued kit is pretty nice with newly added details, great decals, and magnets to hold the shuttle to the sled. You can do the kit as either a Vulcan style or Federation style shuttle.
The Jupiter 2 kits continue to fly out the door. This is truly the best kit of 2009, which was an incredible year for genre models with great kits from Moebius, Pegasus and Round 2.
With all the kits coming out, and lots of great aftermarket products, the Hobbyshop has really dominated the activity on the CultTVman websites. It's been hard to keep up with anything else. The main site has especially suffered from lack of material posted. Its not that I don't have the material. I have plenty of stuff to repost and new stuff to add. I just have not had the time to do it.
A few months ago, the main CultTVman.com shut down unexpectedly. The host told me it was my fault and the site was a major drain and the server could not handle it. Now this was the old part of the site that had never migrated to the CultTVman site. It was 2000-3000 pages that had been operating just fine, untouched or unupdated for years. After a couple days of dealing with morons in the tech support department, I said screw it and moved the site to a new host. At that time, I didn't really bother to repost those old pages. There was some great stuff there, but I needed to post it properly on the CultTVman2 domain.
As you know, the main site was revamped a couple years ago, using DotNetNuke as a framework. This was the part of the site that was hosted on CultTVman2.com. As a content management system, DNN had a lot of great features to offer, and it allowed me the opportunity to keep the site up to date a lot easier. Compared to the old NetObjects software, DNN was a big step forward for ease of use and features. It was now a lot easier to update the site and maintain it as well. Unfortunately, DNN has a few unanticipated drawbacks. First, its not that easy to maintain. You need a specialized host and that costs a bit of money. Second, the software was constantly being updated and each update seemed to introduce incompatibilities and bugs, making upgrading a bit of a chore. Add to that, the modules that you bought through other vendors also needed constant upgrades. I'm not much of a software or systems engineer, so this was not something I could manage. About a year ago, I ended up spending a small fortune to upgrade the site to the latest software. And now I'm at the point where the software was going to need another major upgrade. Do you see the writing on the wall?
A few months ago, I started playing around with Blogspot as a tool to handle hobby news. I found it to be a very easy tool to use and very easy to update. And I got a lot of positive feedback about it. Unfortunately, Blogspot is really just for blogging, but it still got me thinking.
The CultTVman website has been around now for almost 14 years. It started out as a simple two page HTML design using some quick and dirty AOL software. And we thought it was really really cool. That simple two page site started something that grew way beyond anything I ever dreamed or intended. Soon we had a few people getting together for online model chats. People were sending photos of their models and the site started to grow. First it outgrew AOL. Then GeoCities where it first became CultTVman.com. Then Simplenet, which was gobbled up by Yahoo. CultTVman's Ultimate Modeling Guide to the Jupiter 2 was published. We started a forum and a hobby shop. The forum has been through at least 4 software platforms and the shop is on it's fifth. Change is inevitable....
So now the question yet again becomes... "what do I do with the main CultTVman website?" Stay tuned....
