The How I Met Your Mother Blog

No HIMYM news here just a little house clearing. Tomorrow afternoon I board a plane for the booze-laden streets of Austin TX for the SXSWi festival. I’ll be in the Lone Star State until next Tuesday so play nice while I’m gone.

I’ll put up the placeholder post on Monday (I hope anyway) and then I’ll be back with the recap, probably on Wednesday.

My plan is to rewatch The Stinsons on the plane tomorrow and write my recap (finally) but I have a lot of unwatched Lost too so we’ll see who wins.

If any of you will be at SXSW or live in Austin, follow me on twitter and feel free to @ me or just say hello. And if you’re looking for something other than HIMYM to watch, a couple fellow NYC guys made a short film that I’m currently showing to anyone who will listen to me. If you watch it, let me know what you think in the comments.

By popular demand, I will now start streaming episodes on the blog. Right now I’ve only got Sorry, Bro available but I’ll be going back and adding more episodes as I find them. The video will be embedded at the top of that episode’s discussion page. There is also a link in the side bar to watch the most recent episode.

This is great for people like me who don’t have cable to catch the show when it aires and also good for my non-US readers who might not have the show air on their local TV networks.

Let me know if there are any problems, I’m still working out the embedding details.

OK, so I tweaked a couple more things.

First, I know a lot of you are ad haters. If you want to support the blog but ads aren’t your thing, I added a “donate” button in the middle column. If you want to throw me a dollar or two or twenty, it’d go to the good cause of paying for hosting, etc. And I’d really appreciate it.

Second, YouTube just started offering a sponsored video unit for blogs. I’ve added one below the first post on the main page and linked it up with Lifetime and TV Guide. I’ve got it playing as I write this and have to say it’s pretty cool. It’s like Entertainment Tonight but only about the stuff we like. It’s got interviews with the cast, behind the scenes info, and other cool content. Definitely check it out.

That’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking the design over the next little while since I’ll get new ideas.

Well, that was long overdue. Up until tonight, the music list stopped at The Bracket. Thanks to reader Kevin, the rest of Season 3 and all of Season 4 so far is now posted.

http://have-you-met-ted.com/music/

The music page is the second most viewed page on the site, after the homepage, so I felt bad I hadn’t updated. Thanks Kevin!

Update #2: I’ve tweaked a couple things that should make the content column easier to focus on. The text is bigger, and the other boxes’ background color is dulled a little. It’s still a work in progress. I hear you all request the content in the middle but I promise if you give this a try you’ll grow to like it. The content is what you want right? So it makes sense to have that be the first thing you see on the page. Just because it’s a certain way everywhere doesn’t make it right.

Update: Maintenance is (mostly) complete. If you see anything broken or weird, let me know. I’ve done 0 browser testing (because I’m a professional.) A new module or two will be added to the far right (like ‘recent comments’) at some point in the next few days.

What do you guys think of the new design? I assume half will hate it and the other half will like it or just not care.

You’ll notice there are more ads now, and the ads are more prominently placed. I’d love to have the site make a little money. If you like what you see around here and want to support, check out the ads or buy The Bro Code or some DVDs over on the right.

Can you think of any other Amazon products I could feature here? Cross promotions?

I’m reworking the website layout a bit with some changes I think you guys will like. Trying to update, make it a little less bloggy and a little more modern. I’m moving some modules around, adding some things, etc. For the next day or so things might look strange around here. Hang in there until I get it all straightened out. I’ll update this page with progress.