It's here. Sort of. A little. If you squint.

No, seriously - the website is "done," it's beta time. There are some pages missing - for instance, we need to re-do the About and Blog sections, but for the purposes of beta, here it is. Time for bug reports. The site should work perfectly in every major browser that's even kind-of recent, but we can't really exhaustively test on everything.

It's important to note that the video on this page is not the final Project Halp. This video was made before we even started the offical project, as a proof-of-concept to show to the guy who will be editing the final video. However, this will be the first time any of you will have heard the "full" Down in Front theme, not just the stinger that plays in the episodes. So that's fun.

The site won't be live until Project Halp is complete, which could be a couple weeks. I'd also like to time the roll-out to an Important Movie, so we can get some sharing/tweeting action.

Let's talk about what's here.

First, this should feel like the natural evolution - the big brother - to old DIF. You're greeted by the movie of the week, you can flip backward. But already we meet the first feature - no frames. We have little Hulu arrows to go backward or forward in time. Everything slides and animates as sexily as it can, at almost no time-expense to the visitor. Not to mention that in addition to the usual visible links to all the formats the episode is available in, there's a handy-dandy "permalink" button for grabbing a link to the episode you're looking at. (That will work long after the movie of the week has changed.)

And - I love this - every episode, every week, has a one-click tool for posting on Twitter, Facebook, or Google +. I expect all of us to be using these tools quite a bit in the future. But do not use them now. You can click on them and see what they do, but do not commit a post to your Facebook or Twitter containing the resulting link - obviously the site is not a secret, but we want to hold off on this for purposes of discretion and, more importantly, because the links generated will not work as soon as we officially release the site.

Alright, let's talk about the obvious one - the power-house feature of the redesign, our database.

Zarban (and others) have implored us to allow for sorting, but we didn't want the site to sacrifice sexiness for function. (Nor vice-versa, but a pretty site is important. To me. And Holden. We're fickle.) As such, getting something that was super functional and easy on the eyes took some thinkin.' The result is what you see before you. The default is "release," which means at the top of the stack when you get to the site is the most recent episode. You can scroll down from there, or - to skip to the bottom, just click on "release" again. Rinse and repeat for all of the columns - clicking on the sort type will invert the results.

Title searches by...um, title. Year by year of release. And rating by a rating system we're still working on - eventually it'll refer to number of downloads (potentially with us false-positiving some of our favorites to the top), but there are no plans at this time to build-in user rating. The reason we have a rating column is actually a sly one - we want a new user to come to the site, maybe go "well, I'll listen to the highest rated one," and we get to force a card on them and put our best foot forward. Actually, now that I think about it, we'll probably have a thread where everyone lists their top five favorite episodes and we'll aggregate the results. Or something.

Anyway, last thing is the Project Halp video, which will live where this proof of concept video lives now.

You didn't read this whole thing, did you? You just scrolled down here to get the link. You bastard.

Alright, fine.

Holden Hill presents Down in Front version 3.0.

For my birthday, my girlfriend to end all girlfriends got us tickets to see John Williams live at the beautiful Hollywood Bowl. At first I was wary of all the little kids who brought their lightsaber toys to an ostensibly classical concert, but I gave up my curmugeonry when the Imperial March started. You'll get the idea ten seconds in, but I let the camera roll for the rest of the song and the beginning of the next piece of music - which you'll also recognize.

The show was amazing, it was a powerful and moving thing to see and I'm glad I got to see it before John Williams dies. Which will be, like, tomorrow.