Notice something different at Comics Bulletin?  Yeah, it looks different, all slicked up, upgraded, and new.  Pretty impressive, no?

Well it wasn't as easy as you may think.  So I want to call out to the people who made it work – in a progeeky way.

Jason and the entire staff made this thing work.  They tested the code, ran the upgrades, suffered through endless amounts of weird and bizarre issues from "easy" migrations.  They managed to pull it off, and I want to thank them – and thank Jason for sharing his experiences with me.

It's easy to take this stuff for granted because in time the web page runs, the updates work, and everything looks fine.  But we shouldn't, because we forget how challenging it is until next time.

We should also remember what this means for us professionally – everyone that runs this site, everyone that contributes, everyone who may, everyone who may do something similar.  This is a "Professional Hobby."

Imagine as you participate in this or another site, what you'll learn.  You will learn about editing, or art, or insane server config issues.  Your hobby is going to teach you a lot of technical and professional skills – like it or not.

Think of the character-building doing a project like this entails (I can tell you a few stories of my own efforts).  Efforts like running a fansite or a progeek site can really help you grow – or harden you to face adversity.  Working on a website like this can help you grow as a person (if you don't snap).

Finally, in your professional life, an effort like this shows your skills and character.  Running a site, building it, contributing to it – working here or in a similar site is a way of doing professional things as a hobby.  It shows you are talented and committed.

In fact, in the last week, I used the site in a professional discussion on rhetoric and language. Seriously – and it may have netted me an interview for my own site.

So let's remember all the people doing work here.

Let's remember that we can contribute here, or elsewhere, or run our own site, and grow professionally.  Best of all, it's growing professionally while we write about, review, or complain about comics, games, and film.

I'd call that a win-win.