I want to thank all of our bloggers for their contributions the past few weeks and offer my encouragement to keep it up! So far it’s working exactly as I hoped, with interesting commentary about film scores feeding through the “comments” function into healthy debate and discussion at our message board.

Our next project at the site is a facelift for FSM Online with more indexing and search capabilities of the great articles Tim and Jon and their team have created in the first few years of the project. Stay tuned!

A few requests of the bloggers:

1) Please don’t forget to set your “teaser” anchors. Huh, what, you say? Non-bloggers, ignore this—bloggers, it’s the last item in the “editing instructions” in the article creation window. This affects the “teaser” text displayed from the start of your article so the teaser doesn’t break off in mid-sentence or word.

2) Please use the “import from word” icon if you are importing your article from another source. This makes sure it’s in the proper font and eliminates all sorts of style weirdness. And always, save your article before uploading it lest it blink out of existence as happened to me the first time I wrote this column not too long ago…gr….

3) A request that I do not make lightly: To the extent that you mention film score CDs, if you can link to the appropriate product page from SAE (our retail partner), it would be greatly appreciated (e.g. Planet of the Apes is a classic score). I was hesitant to ask this and I’m doing so publicly so it doesn’t look like the entire point of the blogs was to push product. I believe in the separation of “church and state” in editorial terms which is the freedom of editorial content from business considerations. (This is why we have never reviewed FSM CDs in the pages and online screens of FSM, because it would be unethical.) However, it’s natural for film score blogs to discuss film score CDs, and for those reading the blogs to want to buy them—and it might as well be from us. When you think about it, the entire free area of this website is financed by our CD sales, and these improvements lately have cost more than a pretty penny. I do realize, by the way, that this is work I am asking of the bloggers to program all these links which is why I leave it to your individual discretion.

I’d also welcome a discussion of this in the comments field of this article. It’s important that we have integrity around here; call us old-fashioned. Fire away below: