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Ten years ago this month, I launched the pathetic caverns. It originally started as the personal “corner” of my professional website, but my interest in music, film, and literature dominated the contents from the outset. By the time I obtained a domain name for it in 1997, the pathetic caverns had more-or-less mutated into a media review zine, although vestiges of the old (lack of) design still lingered.

Throughout the last decade, I learned lots about interface design, information architecture, usability and assorted web technology. Very little of that knowledge was applied to the pathetic caverns, which continued to sport an embarrassingly outdated design. I didn’t get around to cleaning house until 2004, when I relaunched the site with a sleeker interface.

I’m currently in the design phase of another re-launch. This time pathetic caverns will finally become a truly dynamic, database-driven site. But these days many people rely on RSS feeds to see when a site has been updated, and I decided not to wait until the site moves to the new host to roll out that functionality.

So here is the pathetic caverns’ 10th anniversary present. It’s, uh, in beta testing, naturellement, and anything anybody wants to share with me about how well it does or doesn’t work in a given feed reader will be very welcome.

I know, I know, it should be “movies,” but just it won’t fit on a standard 80×15 badge. I’m going to change the whole site IA from “movies” to “film,” but that has to wait for the relaunch/move and dynamic URL re-writing so old links don’t break. In the meantime, we is ungrammatical. Sorry.

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