Playing with site

We’ll be trying out a few things with the site over the next little while, so please be patient if the blog looks whack.

New Look

We’ve gone through with a long overdue update to WordPress (the code that runs the blog). While we were doing that, we figured we might as well try on a new look as well. So here it is.

There’s a lot of stuff that broke during the change and a lot minor cosmetic details that bother us. We’ll be working on it slowly over the next little while. Feel free to point out issues/comments as a reply to this post.

And, yes, the RSS feed is borked. RSS is back up.

Triple Trouble

Today marks the third anniversary of our humble little blog. So why not take a little time to look back and toot our horn a little. Surely we deserve it. Surely.

It all started one day when we thought it might be cool to have our own street corner for us to peddle our thoughts on improv with the world wide web because, lord knows, the world needs it. And here we are, three trips around the sun since our first post, still going on and on about ourselves.

Aside:
I have to take moment here to give a big thank you to Dustin for hosting us all of this time. He’s awesome and makes video games. Go try one out! Lux rules!.

We’ve written well over 500 posts about whatever thought pops into our head, which comes out to about 3 posts per week. Of course, I think what we’re most proud of is that we are one of the few websites/blogs that has offered good coverage of the Montreal Fringe for the last 3 years. We’ve reviewed all manner of shows around Montreal, and not just improv. And we’ve journaled our exotic travels around the world to such places as:

• Ottawa!,
• Victoria!,
• London!,
• Burlington, Vermont!,
• New York City!, and
• Pierrefonds Comprehensive High School!

So if you haven’t already, add our RSS feed to your daily routine or check out Bryan’s awesome STAT MACHINE^TM for all your Without Annette Fantasy Pool info. Thanks to any and all of you who drop in to check us out. We hope to keep it up.

Fun & Difficult

You can now rate games on fun and difficulty in the Games section of this website. Finally, you have a place to rail (numerically) against all those games that suck! I thought it would be a fun (and not so difficult) way to make the games page more interractive, since I still haven’t implemented user comments. (Nor will I any time soon.)

Please feel free to leave suggestions on how to improve the games page.

Enjoy!

Blog turns 2

This blog turns 2 today. Thanks for reading!

This past year, we managed 113 posts and you/we managed 161 comments. We need to start writing again!

Here are some of my favourite posts from the past year:

Picture This: Vinny recapped our trip to Victoria in pictures
The Best McGill Residence: I reviewed McGill’s residences based purely on improv criteria
From the Mailbox: A YouTube link that I still have stuck in my head. He wiiill.
The Annies: Vinny and I handed out our first annual Montreal Fringe Festival awards.
iFest’06 Finals: Blogging the Burlington improv festival
Ladders: Backstage at TSC

And recaps from some of my favourite shows:
Une Eau: The 7-person Uno
All About Olives: A western radio play
Forever Smokey: A English radio play

Hey gang, how about we aim for 300 posts this year? We pulled off 250 in our first.

We’re Back!

Sorry about the outage, folks. I missed the renewal deadline for the domain name and we only realised what had happened the same way everyone else did, withoutannette.net was AWOL. We’re still not sure what happened to the reminder emails, though we suspect a spam filter ate them. (I just got a mental image of a clogged spam filter; I mean a physical Spam filter, like one they might have on the drainage floor at a Spam factory.)

In any case, we’re back in action and ready to blog slowly once again!

caching

I changed some settings so that blog will not re-load the page everytime you navigate through the blog. It used to be that forgetting to put “i am human” in the comment screen would cause your comment to get lost. Now if you hit the back button, your comment will still be in the form. Hopefully, nothing else will break. Leave us a comment if you get weird results… Thanks!

Blog Turns 1

This blog turns 1 today. Thanks for reading!

We managed 250 posts and 485 comments. Pulled from our stats page, here is a selection of posts that you deigned comment on:

• “Vinny Done Had A Baby” by vinnyfrancois ( 24 | 18 )
• “Just Add Water” by vinnyfrancois ( 16 | 8 )
• “Prank Gone Too Far” by b.j.swank ( 12 | 7 )
• “Review: La LICUQAM” by b.j.swank ( 11 | 7 )
• “Packed to the Gils” by b.j.swank ( 9 | 6 )
• “Teenie Little Set” by thegirl ( 9 | 6 )
• “2004 News Stories?” by b.j.swank ( 6 | 6 )
• “Nikki the Good…Lawful Good Cleric” by brian ( 14 | 5 )
• “When the fat lady sings” by b.j.swank ( 13 | 5 )
• “The Without Annette Quiz” by b.j.swank ( 7 | 5 )
  

And this post got picked up by a bunch of business-type blogs:

• “A Central Tenet” by vinnyfrancois ( 1 | 1 )

Mailing List

We’re now hosting our own mailing list from this site (rather than using the rather mediocre yahoogroups), so you can now sign up to our mailing list online!

Stats!

Clearly, we needed blog stats and ol’ spreadsheet delivered.

RSS Fixed

It’s all good.

RSS Feed Problems

We are aware that the RSS feed is currently on the fritz (is that anti-German?). This issue will hopefully be rectified in the coming days but between the upcoming shows in Ottawa and the Christmas/New Year’s binge drinking that can paralyze the troupe for days on end, it might take a couple weeks. In fact, if things get worse we’ll have to come over to your house with a Sharpie and write our posts on your monitor.