International Traffic

Now, if that's not international traffic, I'm not sure what is. Welcome visitors, including those from the nation of "misc." I wonder why Sweden is number 4?

On Our Second Anniversary...

Wow! Another year down, and it's been a busy one here on The Armchair Critic. Ever since our first post, we've been endeavoring to entertain, educate, and impart useful information that you can't find anywhere else on the entire internet. Here's my view of how our sophomore effort went.

Quite well in the end. Despite the loss of one of our more prolific writers who needed to move on to other endeavors, we still managed over 300 posts in 2007, up from under 200 the year before. Special thanks to Jeff, Jim, and Scott for their regular and high quality output. I'd also like to give an honorable mention to Rachel for her annual contribution expertise, and Armchair Newcomer Ian who brings his youthful viewpoint. Only as a team can this all succeed, and we've assembled a first rate one.

This internet game is all about links, and we've done much better this year than last. In fact, the prestigious Internet Movie Database (IMDB) has been routinely picking up our content. Also, movie site Popcorn Monsters carries our reviews as well. This among other links this year gets us the exposure that we need.


With exposure comes traffic. From the chart we can see that our traffic has essentially doubled most months compared to last year- not the easiest thing to do amidst more and more sites all competing for your eyeballs. Thanks again to all that stop by, and make us your destination for the most opinionated reviews out there on a wide variety of topics. We look forward to another successful year!

Jonas
Webmaster

Recent Visitors

It's always neat to check on where our traffic is coming from. Welcome visitors from Morocco, Egypt, Nigeria, and yes, that's Singapore off to the right. Cool!

--Jonas

We've Been Armchaired!

Recently, a new website got in touch with me. The idea is that it's a website that reviews other web sites, and it's called Jerome Surfs. Based in the Philippines, Jerome's ambition is to review a site a day, and wanted to find out if we were interested. Of course we were, and a week later, he shared The Armchair Critic with his readership.

I thank Jerome for his insightful comments, and encourage other sites to let him give them the once over. While I agree we have too many tags, for the time being we're stuck with them, and it is convenient to find older content, and keeps us organized. I also appreciate that he took the time to get some background on who we were, and how we ended up doing this.

Happy Surfing Jerome!

--Jonas

Another Armchair?

I'm guessing that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but you'd think that in this day and age, someone would check if their name is unique (as I did) before setting up their blog...

See here.

For the record, we've been around eons longer than her! Remember, we are THE Armchair Critic, before others wanted to copy us.

--Jonas

First Armchair Critic Podcast, March 2007

I've debated with starting a podcast to support the site. While I'm still not sure of the ideal way to accomplish this, I've decided to follow the old Nike ad: "Just Do It." To that end, our first podcast is ready for public consumption. I'd appreciate any comments, and this is a work in progress so it may take a while before we standardize the format. Anyway, here goes, and enjoy.

Take a listen here.

FYI: It's in the mp3 format for max compatibility, and can be listened to on screen, or downloaded for offline consumption later. Consider loading it onto an iPod or similar device and listening on the way to work, etc.

Traffic March '07

Welcome, visitors from Brazil, Africa, Australia, Hawaii, Japan, China, Europe, and of course, the good ol' US of A. However you found us, we're glad you did. I'm still waiting for our first visitor from Antarctica...

Armchair 2.0

By now, our faithful readership has noticed that we've done a little "face lift" around the ol' Armchair Critic. Last week Blogger finally let our team blog go to the newer 2.0 interface. Hopefully it will be more stable than the previous version. I also took the opportunity to clean up some of the clutter that had accumulated over the past year.

The killer app of Blogger 2.0 is the tags. This makes it real simple to find more content. For example, clicking on a musical group's, or author's name in the tags at the end of the post will bring up all of the reviews we've done by that particular group or actor. It also allows us to easily keep track of how many movie reviews we've done, and more easily find older content for us as well as our readership. Another advantage is that we can more easily add online videos, like the one I found below.

Thanks for bearing with us during the last week or so, and things should run normally from here on out...at least for a while!

Our International Audience...

I'm simply amazed at the international audience we have with our blog. Believe it or not, this is just in the last week! We've got every continent except Antarctica with people looking at this. They have internet access down there...no?

On Our One Year Anniversary....

Just about a year ago, I looked around and realized that while there are tons of websites, no one was reviewing the kind of entertainment that me and some friends were really interested in. I approached some of them, and roped them into writing for my vision of an "entertainment blog" that became known as "The Armchair Critic." Our first post was just about one year ago today. I wasn't sure that we'd have enough content as more than half the blogs on the web have had no update for over three months.

Recently, at a party, a gentleman (who is a friend of a friend, but I had never met) came up to me and asked "So, you're Jonas, THE Armchair Critic." This was in fact Steve, who ran a now defunct entertainment site from the late '90's known as "Rant Rave" that didn't weather an unfortunate server crash too well. His question caught me a little off guard as this was the first time that anyone had identified me as having any relation to any website.

While I did conceive this site, and function as the webmaster, as well as providing a fair chunk of the content (specializing in not so recently released DVD's...), this site is only functioning because of the contributions of others. I'd like to thank, on our anniversary, the regular and outstanding contributions on Scott and Mike. Both have put forth A TON of effort to create the content that we all enjoy on a regular basis. In addition, I'd also like to thank our occasional contributors Jim and Rachel, that help provide additional depth and material enriching us all.

We reached over 10,000 page views in under a year, which is impressive as none of us have quit our day jobs to do this endeavor. Taking an unknown site such as this one, and getting it known is always a challenge. Add in the fact that my area of expertise is really computer hardware (at least within computers...), and that my writers had little HTML experience and we had the deck stacked against us. Be that as it may, we persevered, and now are getting over one thousand page views per month lately!

Thanks again to our loyal readership. We're here to stay, and you can count on us to continue to provide you with "the most opinionated reviews from the world of entertainment." Happy holidays to all!

--Jonas

November Traffic

Thanks to all for making November one of our best months ever for traffic!

An International Flair To Our Recent Traffic

Lest you thought that only our friends were reading this, I promise you I don't know anyone in most of these countries! Gidday to all and welcome!

Digg This
Del.icio.us

Television Reviews

As we move into the Fall 2006 television season, expect our very opinionated reviews of some new TV shows. I've created a page to link to all of them. It will either be to the right in FireFox, or at the bottom in Internet Explorer (I have no idea where it ends up in Safari or other browsers...). Enjoy!

More TV Reviews.

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A New Save Page Feature

When you find something interesting on the internet, of course we all want to be able to find it again, and even share it with others. One way to be able to do this is to print it out, and put it up on the refrigerator with a magnet. While that will work it is so '90's (or maybe even '80's).

Anyway, we are in the Web 2.0 era. Social bookmarking is all the rage. Social who? That's social bookmarking! With a free online account, to a site like Delicious, you can save the reviews that you want to be able to find at a later date. If several users save the same item, then it becomes a "hot" review, and the packs swarm.

To make this easier, all new reviews will have the "Save This Link" next to the Delicious "chiclet" at the bottom of the post. Give it a try, and you'll be hooked. Enjoy!

I'm also including Digg which is a similar service. If you enjoy an article, here or anywhere else, feel free to "digg it."

Save This Page

A Word About the Comments...

Regrettably, I've had to shut down the comments on this site. While we occasionally had some real conversation, it was not the norm. Last night, I found a string of multiple comments that was offensive, and far more suitable to be etched in a NY Subway stall than on The Armchair Critic.

I cleaned it up, and hopefully no one was offended. At first, I didn't want to give these folks the attention that they probably desire, but hiding the truth is never the way to solve anything. History teaches that time and again.

As a stop gap measure, I've disabled the comments so this cannot happen again. I'll explore either a forum, or some way of moderating the comments. As often happens, a few can bring down the masses, like on September 11th, 2001- temporarily. Rest assured, we're here for the duration, and we're wiping our feet and moving on!

Thanks for your continued support and understanding. As we gain popularity, this type of behavior is "par for the course" apparently!

In Case You're Wondering How We're Doing...

Here's our traffic over the last few months. You can see we're growing nicely, and off to a good start for July! Thanks again to our loyal readership that pushed us past a total of 5000 page views this week!

FYI

We've put together a nice collection of content over the last few months. However, there has been a downside that it is a little difficult to naviagate the Armchair Critic to get to the older content.

Read a movie review you like? Want to read another? Well, before the only way was to wade through the archives. Quite honestly few do; it is the internet equivalent of going down to the stacks in your local library. Unless you're really looking for something, it's simply not worth the effort.

Well, this is the age of Web2.0. For everyone's convenience, if you look in the upper right hand corner of any Armchair page, you'll see that we've included links to a page that will list for you our reviews in the categories of books, movies and music. Of course, you can click directly from there to the review.

We'll do our best to keep this updated as well.

Consider this a growth step as we move from a blog to a more full featured web site!

An Introduction, of Sorts

Second day of class, junior year of high school, September 1986: The third year of my four-year sentence did not begin auspiciously. Here I am doing exactly what I did yesterday during lunch -- walking around the cafeteria, looking for an empty seat at a table where I'd feel welcome. Wait, what about over there... with those two? Scott, don't do this to yourself... you'll be stuck with the "geek" label the rest of your life... you'll waste countless hours over-dissecting Star Trek and Star Wars and you'll still be playing Dungeons and Dragons in your mid-thirties... you'll wind up with no friends, at least none that any normal, sensible, well-adjusted person would ever admit to having and...

(glossing over nineteen years and a handful of important details)

...and here we are starting a blog together. I guess some things were meant to last. Hopefully this little endeavor will be one of them.

Welcome!

This is our first post of our new blog! We're planning to bring you reviews of current books, movies, music and table games. Quite frankly, no one else is satisfying this niche, so we decided to do it ourselves. Enjoy, and check back soon as we get up and running.