Hi folks. Hope you are all enjoying your holidays - I am having a nice relaxing time out of town - hence the lack of activity on the blog.

2009 was a busy year for me and no doubt the down economy has touched many - while income for the site from purchase commissions is down, I do want to thank all the folks that use the Amazon, Best Buy and other links when making their purchases.

While I don’t run the site purely for financial gain, in a year like this every bit helps and it keeps me encouraged to maintain the database and the site, when there are so many other things I could spend time on.

Over at the forum I see we have over 400 members now - no doubt most signing up for the MyBlu-rayStats feature - though there has been a little discussion from time to time too.

In any case, all the best, hope 2009 was not too rough on you and best wishes as we move in to 2010…!

I just wanted to let folks know that there is a new revision of code for the stats page that is purely to make it easier to make new pages in the future.

My plan is to add some new charts that may be fun to check out for movies you might like.

If I did my job right, you should not see any difference from the old version of the page.

If you see any strange happenings, please let me know

This is just a heads up for anyone keeping track.

Since Universal distributes Summit titles, much like Pararmount does for DreamWorks, I have attributed the Summit titles to the Universal total instead of just ‘Other’.

This will have caused the pie charts to jump a little, but be assured that this was expected and is not an error.

Sorry to the 2 people that care!

Some of you may have noticed a new feature block on the home page for the site.

The new Recent Amazon Bargains and Deals widget lists the most recent titles listed for 50% off or more.

And to prove it’s worth I see right now that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has been dropped to half retail price, selling for only $19.99.

So if you are interested in the most recent bargains available at Amazon, check the home page for a regularly updated list.

Today is Labor Day in the United States, and as with other public holidays, I am going to take the opportunity to talk about some behind the scenes and personal activities.

September is a very busy month for me personally, with a short film project in progress and a two week vacation in Europe at the end of the month.

I intend to keep up the basic updates while I am travelling, but there will probably be less here in the News Log during that time.

On the website side of things I am working on two new features for the database.

Firstly I am enabling international entries, which will allow the same kind of details that we have for the US database to be stored for titles of interest from other countries.

Secondly I am aiming to enable extensions for titles with more than one disc or one movie included, to allow for complete information for box sets.

These features are in progress and will eventually go live on the site.

Hope all you US residents had a great three day weekend!

Just wanted to let you know that the server move is now complete and we are operating off a dedicated server now.

So no more issues with the server being disabled when too many of you visit!

I found a couple of bugs this morning, and no doubt there are more remaining - if you find anything please let me know in comments or on the forum.

To me it feels like it is a little slower, so the next phase will look into ways to speed things up.

I am happy to report that the database is back online and that it is pretty much business as usual on the regular pages.

However this outage has pushed me to move the site again to yet another server after only a month at DreamHost.

This time I am acquiring a dedicated host, so we should see some performance improvements.

On the downside, there may be some more down time as the move is made.

Thinking about how this ‘hobby’ site has grown has gotten me a little philisophical and misty eyed - my how things have grown.

With over 50GB of traffic a month, the shared server approach is not working out.

The downside of dedicated server of course is the costs, and I will probably implement a couple of things to help defray this cost.

Perhaps the most fun will be a subscription membership, with special privileges and services, like the ability to list titles for trade or sale.

I expect that the subscription will be in the $2-3 per month range, and will offer new services - all current free services will remain free.

If you have any ideas for services that could be offered or any thoughts at all about this, feel free to comment.

I want to avoid moving towards Adsense and other intrusional advertising, so hopefully we can build a small community of users that can support the site through this small monthly fee.

As I noted the other day, I had to move the whole website over to another server this weekend.

The mopping up is mostly done now, and you should see most pages functioning normally, or even looking a little nicer than before.

Please let me know in comments or on the forum if you see anything strange.

Interestingly enough, the problem that caused the relocation was a mixed blessing.

Essentially the site shut itself down due to too much traffic.

When the monthly traffic exceeded the 50GB of my account, the management pulled the plug.

The site has been moved to a new service that does not have such limits and I think that most of the pages actually load a little faster.

In any case, just wanted to keep you all informed as to what went on… I spent most of the weekend updating code which was not what I had planned!

While I was thinking about relocating the site due to increased traffic exceeding my ISP limits each month, I was heavily encouraged to do so today by the site outage that started last night.

So it all moved ahead of the time I expected to have to do it!

As a result, some stuff won’t work correctly for a while.

Update:  Almost finished with the code - hopefully will have more fun things to say soon.

Those with a Fry’s nearby may be interested in an LG Blu-ray Burner for $200 today only.

You may have noticed that the Technical Statistics page now has the same new look that the main Stats Page got a few days back.

Again I decided to add a lot of new filters, so now the Title filter is in place, as well as range filters for Bytes on the disc and both Video and Audio Bitrates.

The page retains useful filters for fields like Resolution, Codec and Capacity.

The Aspect Ratio filter groups films into pillarbox (image is narrower than your HDTV), 16:9 (image more or less fills the HDTV screen) and letterbox (image wider than your HDTV).

This will certainly be a fun page to mess with for Tech Heads.

Update: The Rewiew Stats and Feature Stats pages have also been updated!

Have fun and please note any strange behaviour in the comments or on the forum…!