For some months now, I’ve been promising that a new FanCruft is coming soon. While a lot of the delay is due to real life concerns (I’m a grad student first, amateur anime reviewer second), nonetheless I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed in myself as I work toward this goal. However, it seems to me that there’s a deeper problem that I need to attack.

When I started working on the new version of the Cruft engine, I imagined it as a very general plugin that, with a few modifications, could be used to create comparison sites for just about anything. In my rush to “ship” something, anything, I think I made a very serious mess of the code I’d already written.

I like WordPress, but I’m also no longer sure that attempting to use it for both the “blog” side of FanCruft and the “Cruft” find-your-anime side was a good idea, and the mis-mash of methods under the hood that’s resulted is, frankly, a problem.

There will be a new version of FanCruft. It will, however, take longer than I originally thought. In the meantime, I will continue to work to make FanCruft the best I can on my own, with the understanding that it must become a community site to truly flourish.