I have suspended producing the This Weekend (TWE) page (and TWE coming) until I can develop improvements to it. The weekly task of gathering the data, the way in which I do it now, interferes with the amount of time available to improve the function. I had hoped to continue it as I developed the new system, but I have not been able to make that plan work.

When I started creating a page featuring links to movie schedules and my movie reviews, one goal was to prompt more reading of my movie reviews, and perhaps also gain more referral fees from Amazon. However, another reason, which I probably did not discuss enough, involved demonstrating as widely as possible that “tools” already exist to popularize freedom with the general public.

Often those in the freedom movement use arguments like “you gotta read this” or “Rothbard [or, Mises, Rand, Proudhon, Friedman, Hayek, George, Mencken, Spooner, Tucker, Nock, Chodorov, etc. – take your pick] wrote . . . ” some idea down on paper. However, many people don’t read much, nor do they know who Rothbard [Mises, Rand, etc. – take your pick] was. They probably don’t care much either.

However, although many people don’t read; even of those, many do watch movies. I hoped to offer a means of spreading the word about movies which could popularize freedom among those who may not do much reading.

I began that effort in 2004. I had gotten back into “computing” in a small way after several years of not doing much in that vein. I worked in the software business for quite a while, but the “time off” from programming came from 1997 until 2003. Quite a lot happened in that time. During that time I used computers, but not in the same way as I had previously. If I had kept up with systems development I probably would have realized sooner that I “worked too hard” to put together the TWE pages.

Even so, eventually I did realize that shortcoming. I have been working to fix the situation. However, the weekly task of preparing TWE interferes with the improvement project. So I am taking a break from TWE while I upgrade it. I do not expect to finish in 2007. Probably “the new TWE” will appear sometime in 2008.

I plan to continue writing new movie reviews much as I have for the last few months: not normally one a week, but perhaps occasionally more than one a month. Though I do not want to promise a specific time frame for the appearance of TWE’s replacement, I can give some general outlines of what I hope to prepare.

I hope to develop a dynamic web-based database driven system using Ruby on Rails to produce a more customizable and flexible set of pages. Those pages will start by covering movies, a bit like TWE did – though with more options and far less tedium for me. I hope to expand that to cover more later. I had stated that earlier as an ambition for TWE, but never managed to do it, due to the data gathering. I also plan on attempting to generalize the system so that it will interact with more than the cable/DBS channels and eventually have the capability to tie in other participants to provide ratings and reviews.