DVD Gift Guide, a new Spin Doctor spinoff

Making a belated entrance for the holidays is my new home video site, DVD Gift Guide. As the handle says, it features DVDs and Blu-rays that would make great gifts, broken down by the sort of person on the receiving end.

The Gift Guide started last year as a page connected to this blog. Traffic was better than I expected and it learned the ways of Google love. I also wanted a site with a sophisticated look and feel, more in line with what I do for clients. 

The gift site is much more visually oriented than DVD Spin Doc, featuring one of those flash slideshows up top as well as a video slot. Hey, it's the big time ... sort of.

Spin Doctor, going on 2 years old, clearly has outgrown TypePad, and so this is the first step in the migration to self-hosting. (For the few who care, I went on a bit about launching this new site and its platform on my writing/SEO blog, Writing for Blogs).

The DVD Gift Guide lets me cover some of the ambitious box sets that don't make the cut here, and opens up less frequently covered categories such as family films and primetime TV-on-DVD. 

Some readers of this home video blog will find the new site a help; others may feel the level of conversation too basic and consumerish. For example, I'm about to review Sam Fuller's violent "White Dog" for this blog, a highly improbable candidate for under-the-tree gifting. For the DVD Gift Guide, I just did a quick look at the rerelease of that wonderful romance "Sabrina," a copy of which would please any woman with a pulse.

As with this DVD blog, support comes from readers who shop at Amazon via our in-text links or display ads. Some readers deliberately start their Amazon shopping trips on DVD Spin Doctor, which sends a few bucks to the cause and doesn't cost the shopper anything extra. Always greatly appreciated, friends.

I'll close with a wish that you enjoy the best of holidays and a prosperous, bull-market new year. And happy viewing to one and all.