I have always enjoyed watching and talking about movies. TV shows too; particularly since the quality and quantity of good TV has increased the last 20 years. There's nothing like sitting down and immersing yourself in some fantastical story about heroes, villains, and monsters. It's escapism at it's finest. It's experiencing a type of adventure that isn't possible in real life. As I got older and the internet expanded, outlets to read about and discuss these movies and shows emerged. We weren't just watching anymore, we were discussing, debating, and theorizing. And something was brewing inside of me.
A long time ago (2010) in a galaxy far, far away (45 minutes from where I live now) He Said, She Said was born.
My former partner in crime and I created a movie review website after a surprising amount encouragement from family and friends. We were both active users on Facebook’s Flixter App. I don't think the app exists anymore, or at least in the same capacity, but it was a nice little tool for aspiring/wannabe critics like ourselves or people who simply liked talking about movies. It was clean and simple. You rated movies on the good ole 1-5 star scale and were given little space for a recap, summary, and evaluation of each movie. It was great. You could share it on your Facebook feed for people to comment on.
Much to our surprise, some people actually took notice. “You should start your own website,” they’d say. We dismissed these accolades as nothing more than people being polite. "Us? Our own website?! Noooooo." The requests kept coming though, so we decided to give it a chance and in August of 2010 something happened. The stars aligned, the primordial soup was boiling over, and He Said, She Said was born.
The site had a very good run. We were averaging roughly 1200 hits a week at it's peak, which was more than my employer at the time. B-list celebs like Michael Jai White and the voice of Siri followed us on Twitter. I was even contacted by a celebrity. Adam Goldberg of Theeeeee Goldbergs emailed me. He actually emailed ME. One of his writers forwarded him a comment I made on a message board and he said something along the lines of "Heard you were a fan!" I didn't believe him at all, but was forced to when he sent me a pictures of him editing the show at his computer. We emailed each other about 5 times over 2 years. It was very cool. He is a very nice guy. Both his real life mom and TV mom interacted with us on Twitter.
I stopped updating the site regularly in 2015 due to issues I was having with my hands. I had developed very severe pain from repetitive use that hampered my abilities to manage something as large as that site, so I created a Facebook page. It was a lot less maintenance and still allowed me to do something I enjoyed. I did still update old reviews whenever I watched a movie again and would link to it on our Facebook page. I was doing that up until a few months ago. Then I would simply reference old reviews without updating them when I hadn't reviewed anything recently. I still deal with this pain, but it's generally under control.
When it came time renew the domain name this year, I decided it wasn't worth the money anymore. It will be expiring very shortly (November 2021). But you know what? I have a hard time letting that site go. I had a lot of fun creating and running it. It was the peak of my "career" as a critic. I never got as many hits or comments as when I was updating it regularly. I put a lot of time and effort into that site. There are somewhere around 400 reviews on that site. I updated it with movie and entertainment news 5-6 days a week. I'd like to find away to keep a part of it going, while continuing this hobby into it's next phase; and that is part of what this new site is all about.
The first iteration of He Said, She Said. I was using Tripod at this point. I think I started with their free plan, which I am back to now funny enough, but eventually moved to one of the pay options because I needed more space. The site was growing and I needed to expand. I was also a fan of their reports. I was very into monitoring the site's data back then. Tripod is not an overly popular domain registry/hosting service - despite being one of the first back in the 90s - but I always thought it was a solid tool
Funny enough, I would leave Tripod because they cut back on their reporting tools. I wasn't able to track data they way I used to and would move over to Yahoo! I forget exactly what the issue was, but I want to say you had to pay more money for the same services or outright eliminated the reports all-together. In the long run, Tripod's reporting tools ended up being more detailed than what Yahoo! offered.
I forget whether I was still at Tripod when I redesigned or did that once I moved to Yahoo!, but this was the second and final look of www.hesaidshesaidreviewsite.com. I preferred this design and color scheme.
As I mentioned above, I stopped updating the site regularly in 2015, but updated many an old review over the years and would link to it from the Facebook page. I also had around the clock RSS feeds on the news page.
