My old movie review website is closing!

Well, an era of indecision is ending.

Eleven years ago, I started an online movie review service. For about a year and a half, I posted regular movie reviews on the web on GeoCities (free web-hosting--an essential component when no one is paying you), and sent them out in e-mails to subscribers (also free). Then I got a writing job with a magazine in Washington, and subsequently, burnout. The result of that was that since 2000, my website had been in limbo--I never officially closed it, but didn't post any new reviews either.

Yahoo!, for whatever reason, is closing down GeoCities for good. I can only fault Yahoo! for this--it was great to have free web-hosting even if it meant carrying their ads and bandwidth limitations. Corporate greed (there‘s a heavy push for us on GeoCities to move to their very expensive paid hosting--I'm not going to pay), incompetence (blogger.com, YouTube, MySpace, and a zillion other sites prove there‘s still a place for free hosting online), and shortsightedness (there are very few web services with a 15 year history--that alone would be a reason to try to keep it open) are the only explanations I can imagine.

In the meantime, I’m going to officially pull the plug. I plan to redirect the domain name here (another free writing project I don’t tend to as often as I should, but that’s another issue), and copy the content over here (marking it with the tag "ReviewsbyJohn"). That way, I’ll be able to keep the reviews online without having to maintain a new site. However, ReviewsbyJohn as a separate service is no more. I will, however, leave the reviews over there for the benefit of anyone with old links, and so they’ll still be available here, if Yahoo! reconsiders.

And I will miss the film-reel graphic--I made that myself with Windows Paint.

Here’s looking at you, kid.