Mondomark.com Construction Update

Updating a blog site is one thing, and prepping a new site is whole new monster that thankfully is being done during a period of the year when the release schedules of most labels are less heavy (like the fall, and the lead-up to Xmas madness).

Of course, WordPress isn’t a simple drop-and-drag setup, and neither is the merging of data. The new blogging site, Mondomark.com, won’t just house the Editor’s Blog, but provide links to archives of older materials from prior print sources, including my DVD and soundtrack reviews for Rue Morgue, and material written over a roughly 18 year period for Music from the Movies.

Now, that last one’s the tricky thing, because around March of 2009, the site went kapoofy (folded) due to the obvious demands, both financial and time-wise, in maintaining an up-to-date soundtrack site.

My work of the past week has entailed salvaging my MFTM soundtrack reviews, interviews, articles, and DVD columns from diverse sources; everything from the magazine’s print years was scanned a long time ago, so those pieces will be available as downloadable jpegs, but everything from the web years was saved in logical and amazingly idiotic places, so it’s a bit of hunt, tracking down saved html copies or MS Word files of the original pieces.

The first stage – the print archive – is done, as are links to the print DVD columns where I covered every blasted composer-friendly DVD release with a commentary and/or isolated score track; it’s a special feature that’s rare, if not virtually dead today, with the exception of the rare DVD release from Fox (who’ve really scaled back their slate of classic back catalogue titles this year). Those scans will be available when the new blog site goes live – ideally by the end of next week.

The next batch of MFTM material to be integrated into KQEK.com’s Film Music section is the defunct online DVD column, which will require fixing a lot of dead links.

See, when material is published, it’s smart for a writer to link each piece to major search engines or websites, like the IMDB, so people know your review, interview or article exists. That’s something I did when I still wrote for Told You So Productions, but when a site dies, as was the case with TYS in 2005, there were 500 DVD IMDB External Review links that were stone cold dead, and each one had to be updated, cutting and pasting new links and bylines into the appropriate fields.

Not fun, but necessary.

The first ‘fixed’ links and MFTM material to be integrated at KQEK.com are a selection of book reviews, which can be accessed via the Author or Title indexes. The reviews includes volumes from the Scarecrow Film Score Series, as well as Quincy Jones’ autobiography.

Coming shortly: new soundtrack and DVD reviews. No, really.

– MRH

Category: EDITOR'S BLOG