So I guess my big news for today is that CADMedia is finally live. Well, technically it went live late Wednesday night, but there were still a couple of bugs to be worked out, so I wasn’t shouting it from the rooftops. But it appears to be running fairly stable now (we’ll find out once you guys hit it full force).

CADMedia is a project I’ve wanted to do for about three years now, since shortly after I started this website. If you were around for the beginning, about three website designs ago, you might recall that I had a reviews section back then. Back when every page on this site was an individual .html file. It was tedious, clunky and tough to maintain. I had some people helping me write reviews and such, but it was pretty unorganized.

The idea for CADMedia was born (moving the reviews to a whole site of its own, with more features and organization), but since I didn’t (and still don’t) know shit about coding fancy stuff like .php and mySQL and all that jazz, I was reliant on other people. My old website guys started working on the CADMedia stuff, but they were working for free, and had lives of their own, and it never got finished. It was pushed to the back burner.

Fast forward to last summer when Pierre and I started talking about redesigning my website (the design you see here now). Pierre is my main man when it comes to all things website related. He’s a genius with this stuff. Anything I think of, he can make happen. So when we were talking about breathing some new life into the main CAD website, I rekindled my interest in CADMedia. And if there was anyone who could give me a full-featured review site, it was Pierre.

I love video games, and I love talking about them just as much as I love playing them. I can (and often do) write reviews of the games I play here in my newsposts. But the problem with that is, every couple of days with a new comic this news page gets reset, and anything I write is shuffled into the archives. My reviews aren’t, by any means, catalogued or easily accessible. So often I would be discouraged from going as in-depth as I would have liked.

Enter CADMedia. Now I have a whole spiffy system where I can review and preview games, and report on news in an easily viewable format. And all of this media will be easily accessible to you right here on CAD. Technically CAD and CADMedia are two sites, but they are very closely integrated. The menu to the left has buttons that will take you back and forth between the comic site and the media site, and the bar to the top has links that will quickly bring you to your console section of choice.

Now obviously right now I’m running CADMedia as a one-man show. And even more obviously (I would imagine), there is no way I’ll be able to keep up with all of the news and reviews on all systems by myself. Eventually, I will be seeking dedicated writers to help me out with CADMedia. I emphasize the “eventually”, because I’m not ready to take applications yet. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

I’m interested in starting slow and small with CADMedia. There is no way we’re going to hit the ground running at the speed of a large network like IGN or GameSpot. I’m going to start by reporting the news and games that I can, finding my footing so to speak. Then I’ll take on two or three writers to help me out, and work closely with them while they get into the swing of things. And once they’re acclimated, I’ll look for a few more writers, and so on and so forth until we have a small network of people working together to bring you all the latest news and reviews.

Now, right now some of you are interested in writing for CADMedia. Some of you have already emailed me to this effect. I really appreciate the display of interest in helping me on this project, but I’m not quite ready for that yet. Pretty soon I’m going to be posting some application guidelines that must be met when submitting your interest in working with CADMedia. There are a few reasons for this, such as making it easier for me to sort through them. Any applications sent before I post the guidelines or that don’t meet the guidelines, won’t be considered. I apologize, but in the event that I get a lot of submissions, I want to make sure that they’re easy to sort through.

But that’s still just a little ways off. I wanted to put that out there right from the start, though. In the meantime I hope you guys enjoy CADMedia. We’ve still got some features that aren’t live yet, and the project will continue to evolve as we tweak and add things in the future.

Yeah, that was pretty longwinded, so I guess I’m done for now. Let me leave you with a couple of spicy tidbits.

My Oblivion review is on CADMedia, if you were waiting for it. Now that that’s up, I’ll comment on Oblivion in addition a bit later on. I have some things to mention that didn’t have a place in the review.

Do you have your Alphabet of Manliness yet? Well, no, you probably don’t, because it’s not out yet. But it will be out soon. Just something to think about.

We don’t live in a world where Transformers exist yet, and it pisses me off.