Some of you may know that I used to have a website called NeonReviews.com. That website has now been closed down, and old reviews have been merged into my regular blog site. The reason for this is the fact that it had remained dormant and left unchecked for about 7 years, and I no longer saw the point of having a separate website just for reviewing stuff. Also, the way I had constructed the NeonReviews site made it hard to maintain, given that all data was placed in plain text files using a customized separator format, and there was no automated way of formatting a review. Sure, I had some custom data fields in those text files that allowed me to set up custom rating bars (measuring up parts of the review), but that wasn’t enough to keep it alive. Parts of the design I loved, but there were certainly parts of it I hated.

So, starting in the late summer of 2012, I started moving over review articles to my blog, and placing them in my review category with a special archive tag, just to show where it originally came from.

The idea behind the NeonReviews website was originally started in mid-to-late 2002, when I thought about having a website with movie reviews from the regular moviegoer’s point of view, where I would also collect opinions from fellow movie fans around the country (Norway). This main idea expanded to include music reviews, and further into other cultural arrangements and events (such as theaters, musicals and concerts). The idea and concept was on ice and revived several times until March 2003, when I launched the NeonReviews website as it ran for a few years. I started out by reviewing the book I had recently bought at that time, and my review for Jennifer Government became the first review I wrote for NeonReviews.

I had originally envisioned NeonReviews as a business/organization that would have several reviewers travelling all over to write articles in a variety of categories, but it never came further than myself along with one of my online friends writing up 3 guest reviews.

The NeonReviews name came about after some brainstorming with friends in the online chat for the small Internet radio channel ErrorFM (where I served as a radio DJ/host for a few years).

I designed and developed the NeonReviews website myself, coded in Perl, and even though it had a lot of ad space (from an ad service called Commission Junction), I never made any money from it. Images for reviews had to be manually cropped and scaled down to two specific image sizes (a small article thumbnail and a larger article image), both versions requiring a different way of cropping. This, along with the fact that regular maintenance took a lot of effort, more or less lead to the abandonment of the NeonReviews for quite some time.

Then, in the early summer of 2012, I finally decided to do something about it, and started planning the retirement of NeonReviews. All articles had been moved over by July, and the final shutdown of the old site was completed by late November, after which all old article URLs were redirected to their new home on my regular blog.

For those of you who followed the old site for a while, I sincerely thank you, but I feel it’s just time to move on. I’ll continue to review various stuff, but from now on, this will just be part of my regular blog, rather than being on a separate website.