With the recent crumbling of eyeofthundera.net after losing all of their forum content I think its easy to say that we’re now the biggest, best and most visited ThunderCats site around. We’re the only active site to have first page google search rankings and thanks to Manny’s efforts at Comic Con and our direct contact with the folks at Hard Hero we’re bringing the major updates to the site first.
When this team started out on our little quest to build a he-man.org-esque site for ThunderCats I’ll bet we thought it would take longer to get here than it did. But when I look at it now I’m not really surprised. We’ve put the best designed site together (although not complete by any means) and created a strong forum community. We’ve been consistent with our front page stories and revolutionized modern day T-Cat content with Kyle’s wicked artwork and Nick’s phenomenal interviews with the cast and characters of the T-Cat show. The podcasts, our brilliant individual sections and original content… as much as there is a recent malaise on the site if we look back at what we’ve built it really is the best on the net.
So what should our priorities be for the near future?
I propose that we should try to focus on building the following:
A temporary new section titled ‘Statues’ in which we’ll post all content related to the Hard Hero statue line. At some point in the future once the statues are well into production or the line has ended I think we could fold this under either Toys or Mechandise.
Gather as much information as we can about the ‘on hold’ ThunderCats movie and the work that was done on Jerry O’Flaherty’s version of the movie. We have a once in a lifetime chance to secure original materials, artwork, notes, interviews etc. for the movie that almost was. I’d like us to put a record together for future fans.
Support Manny’s efforts to update the design of the site. We last visited this topic and agreed that we need to take the site to the next level and allow easier content uploads, self administration of our sections, ability to link stories to social media and vice versa etc. Manny recently posted to say he wants to pick this up again and I think we should get behind him on this.
Build out our individual sections and each commit to posting at least one meaningful update to our section by year end.
I agree with all of the above - and, despite appearances, I haven’t given up hope of expanding either the Comic or Cartoon Sections of this site! Unfortunately these days real life is really getting in my way in terms of processing updates to the site, as I know is true of a number of other members of the TCL team…
I think MannyF’s proposed site redesign could serve a useful purpose in that it will at least freshen up the presentation of material that’s already on the site - there’s a few bits and pieces in the Cartoon Section that, now that I look at them, I realise could be better and there’s probably a relatively easy bit of HTML code that would fix them - obviously Manny’s update will fix them a different way, but it’s at least a chance to correct some of those niggly areas!
I am very disappointed at the fact that we had no prospective team members come forward, though. To be honest, the biggest area where I struggle these days is with the writing of stuff, now that Martin has gone - I’m so busy that the last thing I can summon up the energy to do when I’m tired is write. What would have been lovely for me would have been to have someone to share that workload with, whereupon I could HTML-ise the material they give me, which these days I find a much more “brain dead” job (no negative connotations intended) than trying to be creative!! That’s why the situation with Nick worked out so well IMO!
Hopefully things will sort out so that the site can move forward, and I’m happy to support any reasonable efforts to do so - I don’t think as a team that we will ever be the huge production line that we were back in 2006/2007, but it would be great to get things back moving in a forward direction!
By the way, could I get everyone’s questions for Rob at Hard Hero in the thread in the toys section? I’d like to get those sent over to him on Monday and would like the team’s thoughts on this.
Also I’ve put a poll up in that section to get Rob and his team the official fan reaction on the Lion-O statue. The higher the numbers on that the more seriously he’ll take it so could everyone vote their reaction in there too?
Hey gang, well I’ve been meaning to get this done since before we saw the Lion-O pics from Comic Con and before Manny put up the awesome video of the statue. But I’ve finally gotten off my keester and pulled out the old html program (it’s pretty good it’s called CoffeeCup HTML and has a What You See Is What You Get feature).
I’ve put a few pages up under the Merchandise header, and so item 1 of four on the list above is all taken care of now. I will endeavour to keep this section updated as best as I can whenever we hear something new and exciting from Hard Hero.
I realize the Merchandise section wasn’t intended for the statues, but was to be all encompassing but I thought it made sense to put this statue stuff in there for now and once the excitement has died down a bit we can fold the statue stuff into a sub section in the Merchandise area.
Unfortunately these days real life is really getting in my way in terms of processing updates to the site, as I know is true of a number of other members of the TCL team… 
That’s why the situation with Nick worked out so well IMO! 