DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

That was a stupendously funny episode I’ve just watched. Great stuff.

My favourite online DVD retailer for R1 discs, is pretty much going to close down. DV-Depot have been brilliant to shop with – cheap courier shipping, customs-friendly packaging (no tax paid on what must be about £3000 worth of DVDs), excellent customer service – and an amazingly powerful shopping cart. Now I’ve got to find a comparable retailer (reasonably priced discs, cheap shipping, no taxes). Bugger.

To All Our Valued Depot Customers

It comes with sincere sadness to have to announce that the main Depot site will be restructuring starting today for an indefinite period of time.

This decision has become necessary due to a steady decline in business and corresponding profit levels over the past 18 months. Our main business is no longer financially viable. Our motto from day one was always about customer service – to offer the things that no other DVD retailer did. The drop in profits has forced us to slowly reduce our performance, to a level that we are no longer satisfied with.

The main site has been turned off for a few days – we are taking a full inventory and when complete, the main site will reopen. If you have checked out an order, these will be completed and shipped. For the forseeable future, we will not be bringing in any more new releases or catalog product.

If you have prepaid a disc, you can either refund the title yourself and the money will go into your Depot account. Should you wish a refund back to your credit card, please open a support ticket and this will be done.

We still have lots of stock in all genres – every title including rare out of print titles will be put on sale – details will be announced when we reopen in a few days..

We recently streamlined the Adult Depot operation and this will continue to remain open as it currently is. The Adult site will grow over time as profits allow.

The decision to restructure our main site was a tough one – but we are doing it today so that we can do this with our heads held high – so that no employee, supplier or customer will lose any money – and we can end this phase of the Depot with a sense of accomplishment by all the employees..

All indications point to a continuing drop in business – I am though, cautiously optimistic that once high definition DVD comes that we’ll see a resurgence in DVD sales – when it comes, we’ll reassess things and decide whether to relaunch our main site with a fresh start.

Please stay in touch via our forums..

All of us here want to *thank- you very much* for your business, your loyal support, and becoming our friends – it’s been one hellova great ride…

- John, Shaun, Christian and the rest of the Depot staff.

I’ve just finished watching season 1 of Las Vegas on DVD. It was a blind-buy purchase, but one I’m definately glad I made. Decadant, eye-candy filled fun (it’s from writer of The Fast and the Furious…), but not completely without talent (it’s got James Caan, and the girls can actually act).

Definately one I recommend.

Just a note that I upgraded from Wordpress 1.2 to 1.5 on Tuesday. The main benefit of this to anyone who reads this is that if I’ve approved a comment from you, any future comments will now bypass moderation. I’d turn moderation off, except I receive 120 spam-attempts for each real comment!!

It will also make playing with improved designs much easier.

99 Days. 25 million downloads.

I wonder why MS just announced IE7…

Even if it takes over 9 pages of forum thread to do it…

Update (15 Feb): Maybe not…

The feedback to this has been amazing – I’ve had offers of web space, guideline suggestions as well as numerous suggestions of various tools.

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of new stuff, and will add more as I get time.

The individual statistics will be available as soon as I figure out what isn’t working with them – in the meantime, the main page stats do contain this information.

As well as rejigging my code, I’ve also just launched the DVD Profiler Resource Centre. The idea behind this is to provide 1 place to find all of those nifty things that get announced in the forums, are praised as good ideas, and then sink into obscurity because no-one can ever find them again.

It’s labelled as a beta, for a few reasons – I haven’t added all the programs to the main page yet, I haven’t gone through and looked for errors (both HTML and spelling/grammer) and because I plan to implement per-resource download statistics. All the downloads are tracked, and will show up on the main site stats, but per-resource stats will be nice for the authors.

Please check it out (DVD Profiler in the menu bar), and let me know what you think.

I’ve just slimmed down the HTML and CSS as used on the rest of the site, but it’s meant my blog has started looking really weird. I’m trying to fix it now…

[update] not quite right, but good enough for now. I’ll tweak further, and worry about Internet Explorer tomorrow.

Well, if Microsoft feel they can ignore it’s bugs whilst redesigning MSN, I’m certainly going to!