
Hello, and welcome to Southern Vision’s 100th post. While other blogs are around 300, 500 or even 600, this lowly editor is just at numero cento. I’d like to say thanks first to all 69 of my subscribers, and everyone who’s tagged along as this blog has got its start and read, liked and commented on reviews, lists, and pages. Thanks a HELL of a lot to all you guys, you are great. Thanks to WordPress, for making me Freshly Pressed, and thanks a bunch to IMDb for featuring me on the Hit-List. My traffic would be shot to shit without those guys.
We’ve got some ground to cover here, so let’s go over the history of Southern Vison and why I started this darned blog.
Southern Vision was started on February 13 of this year, as a pet project for me to see if I could sustain and write a blog about movies and movie reviews. I wanted to see if I’d enjoy doing it, and if what I had to say made sense on (virtual) paper and if people would actually read it. It wasn’t until March that I got serious and realized I had a goal: to make this at least a remotely successful blog. I had a certain amount of hits I wanted to reach each day, and I made it my goal to make the IMDb Hit List once. I achieved that goal on May 26, when What’s Your Movie Sin? was featured, and I got 10,000 hits on that day alone. I realized I had achieved that goal, and needed to set a new one. I guess I’ve never really decided what that new goal is… all I know is that it feels damn good to be on the Hit List and I’m going to strive for that whenever I can. WordPress were also incredibly nice in making one of my posts Freshly Pressed, which scored a lot of hits, too, and a nice number of subscribers, flooding my email inbox and forcing a rethink into the way I coordinate my blog.
In order to up stats and traffic, I very recently changed the look of my blog, changing the theme and general output. I’ve decided to make reviews more common, too, so if there’s a specific movie you’d like reviewed, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Overall, I guess, I just want SV to be a more accessible, enjoyable place where there’s always fresh content and people can always come in, have a read, and strike up a conversation. Accomplishing something like that, building it from the ground up, may seem small but it’s still an accomplishment, and I really enjoy it.
So far, the blog has had 25,500 hits, and I thank you all so much for every single one.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s in store:
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Reviews: There will be aplenty of these, and of random films, so there should be something to suit you. There’ll probably be about five of these, give or take, a week, some of them reviews I wrote on my computer ages ago, and some of them spur-of-the-moment reviews of films I’ve just seen. You can count on some good reading material and some Netflix recommendations, as well as reviews of the scummy movies you don’t wanna watch.
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Features: Lists (Top 10 Lists, 5 Memorable lists, etc.) These will be random lists of films with a certain thing in common, characters, actors and directors, stuff like that.
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Director Profiles: I haven’t had a chance to really kick into these yet, but occasionally there will be full career profiles of some great directors, with film recommendations, starting points, interesting trivia and useful information.
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Humour: Y’know, the funnies. Spoofs, parodies, take-offs, poking fun at classics, edited imagery, funny quotes, just stuff in general designed to be comic.
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Awards: At the end of the year, probably in December, will be the first ever Southern Vision Annual Awards, in which I ‘award’ movies with prizes won in certain categories that they achieved simply because I watched them and enjoyed them in that area over the course of 2011. These are not just brand new movies I’ll be celebrating… any movie I watched this year that was really exceptionally good will get a nomination, and perhaps a win. I’ll even be getting you guys involved by polling you with some tough movie questions and choices to help me make my mind up.
- Reader Input and Interactivity: As I mentioned in the last sentence of #6, I’m planning on getting the reader (a.k.a. YOU) involved in some of the things that happen at Southern Vision. It’s all fine and dandy if you’re the kind of reader who skims material, and doesn’t bother to comment or participate in polls or anything, I get that, you’re a busy person, but for those people who like commenting and voting in polls, this here’s for you. I’ve already started things like The Weekly Discussion and The Weekly Movie Challenge, which get you guys more involved, but there will be more polls, and occasionally even games. Because it’s fine for a blog to do as it pleases on its own, but interactivity with the reader, finding out what they like and don’t like, what they wanna see and what they don’t, helps to make a more comfortable place to blog and write and read, and a generally better place to be. I’m trying not to say something sappy like Southern Vision: The Blog That Cares, but you get what I mean…
The New Rating System:
I never even asked you guys what you thought of the new rating system. It’s nothing too special, or clever. I normally prefer to rate movies out of ten, but then I realized I can do that just by using the normal five stars thing. Here are ten different ratings: 0.5/5, 1/5, 1.5/5, 2/5, 2.5/5, 3/5, 3.5/5, 4/5, 4.5/5 and 5/5. Ten ratings, all without leaving the boundary of five. And instead of using ‘stars,’ I’m using images relevant to the film I’m reviewing, such as the director’s head or an important item within the film.
Another feature to reviews is the Is It Worth Adding to Your Netflix Queue? gauge. People with a Netflix subscription (or a similar DVD rental agency) like to try out new movies, and like to get recommendations from people they trust. But the Netflix Queue gauge makes recommendations easier, because it gauges them based on three main criteria:
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The overall quality of the film.
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The film’s Rotten Tomatoes score.
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The film’s accessibility.
You can use the position of the needle in the gauge (whether it’s pointed directly at YES, kind of at YES or just barely at YES) to put it in the right position in your queue! Although, remember, I’m not telling you what films to watch or what film’s you’ll like, it’s simply a recommendation based on the above criteria. It’s all up to you, the reader.
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So, with that, I welcome you to another hundred posts of great stuff, and wave adieu to the hundred that preceded it. Thanks again to all you guys for tagging along. There are a lot of movie geeks with laptops and WordPress accounts, but you’ve helped me realize I can be something different, and in the long run, without you, I’d just be stuck collecting Criterion DVDs wasting the days away. So thanks. For everything.
