Another in a series of blog entries about the recent changes to the site.

You may notice that our mailing list is gone. You may also notice that the new content notification script is also gone. Don't worry, you are not crazy. You would have noticed these things because they are, in fact, gone.

Aside from the extra work it would be to move these things over to the new code base, the main reason for their unceremonious exclusion is that email is becoming too expensive to use.

We've had so many problems with outgoing email in the past two years it's not even funny. The war on spam has gotten so bad that receiving servers have a hair-trigger response to any behavior they perceive as being remotely spam-like. And even though we've never once sent out an unrequested email, our mail server was blacklisted multiple times by different receiving servers. (Notably GMail. Bad GMail.)

The upshot of all this is that we've had to pay through the nose to route our email through respectable SMTP servers.

Which is fine for regular business correspondence, but the cost of running a medium-sized mailing list through such a service would be phenomenally more than what we're already paying. And it would be a liability, too, because if even a single user accidentally marked one of our messages as spam, our email service would instantly kick us off and permanently ban us from the email community.

To make a long story short, keeping in touch with audience members via email is expensive and dangerous. Especially for a small business like the Malex Media Network.® (Besides, there's no way we could possibly send an email to announce every new piece of entertainment right now, that would be two emails a week! And I'm looking at increasing the frequency of updates, too, so the amount of email would be too much.)

So, instead of email, I'm strongly recommending that you guys use RSS to stay in the loop about what's going on here at MalexMedia.Net.® (See that page for more information and see what you think.)

Another thing you'll notice is that most pages have a wider layout now. The right-hand blocks that used to show up on every page are only showing up on a few pages now. Being more conservative with the block space is something I've been wanting to pursue for a while now, as it should help us dramatically reduce the apparent clutter on the site.

To make this work, I'm shooting for making all the blocks a lot smarter about when to show up and when to hide. (The goal being to only show you something if you're likely to want it.)

Also worthy of note, the random gallery image has not been removed. It is still available on any gallery page. So if you're interested in rolling the dice and seeing a few completely random pics, just head on over to the gallery and hit refresh a couple of times.

ttyl!

--Alex