Those of you who are regular readers of CinemaSpy — and even those who are casual passersby — have probably been wondering just what the heck has been going on with the site recently, given that there's been no updates in over two weeks.

Many of you have likely also noticed that things generally have been a bit sporadic this year. After solid growth in 2008 and strong growth in 2009, this year has seen a perfect storm that's essentially been brought on by three things:

1) Personal issues
2) Technical issues with the site
3) Adoption of a new platform

First up, yours truly has had to hit the pause button a few times this year, primarily on account of family matters and some career repositioning/expansion. That's all I'm going to say about it, because I realize that for all you readers of the site, you frankly could care less about such matters; you just want to see fresh, quality content on a daily basis. Fair enough. And while I completely empathize, sometimes speed bumps pop up along the highway of life, and you gotta slow down and take care of business.

The second issue concerns some significant shortfalls we've identified on CinemaSpy. While we've had countless kudos on the site's design and basic operation, we've encountered some coding snafus and have been taking steps to rectify them this year, even as we added new functionality here and there. All of this has led to some significant speed slowdowns at a point in time when Google is penalizing sites that load too slowly…which, in turn, leads us directly to point number three…

We are presently rebuilding CinemaSpy on a new platform. This is actually the exciting part for us, as it will enable the site to run much faster and smoother, while simultaneously allowing us to more seamlessly integrate emerging technologies as they arrive on the scene. Workflow will be significantly improved, too, so that we don't experience significant downtime in the future.

We're also taking steps to make the site look fresh and new, while still maintaining a design ethos that's distinctly CinemaSpy; more evolutionary than revolutionary. Basically, we're working to keep the things everyone likes, add new things that should improve upon the original design, and jettison anything that is superfluous or negatively impacts page load times. A good example of this last point concerns Flash. Many may already know that Apple has abandoned Flash technology on its mobile devices, most significantly the hot new iPad. Rather than go into the nuts and bolts of why (read Steve Job's arguments here), we've decided to ditch the Flash in our forthcoming 3.0 homepage design and adopt technologies that allow for maximum exposure and readability across platforms & devices, at the fastest possible speeds.

So, to conclude, I want to apologize to our readers for the downtime and thank you for your patience. We expect to do better in the coming weeks, though a few down days may yet occur as we target launching CinemaSpy 3.0 in early September. By then, we hope to be back to an abundantly productive level, with an emphasis on more original features and exclusive content.