Message Board is back

I get a lot of questions via email about what banjo tuning a certain song is in, who's playing the banjo on a certain track, etc. I usually just reply directly but I figured why not share the answers more broadly, as they often come up repeatedly.

So I just turned the "Message Board" back on. This was something I had put up when I first built the site -- it never saw much use so I took it down. But if folks are interested in using it to discuss tunings of songs I'm playing, or anything else related to old-time music, please feel free! I'll leave it up as a trial for a little while to see if it's getting any use & then re-evaluate.

Click the "Message Board" link on the lower left of the main screen to get in.

I've also added a little "Search" feature that allows you to search Google from here. You can also use it to search sugarinthegourd.com, although not all the pages seemed to be indexed yet -- I am working on fixing this.

While I'm on this topic, this site really requires a screen resolution of 800x600 or (preferably) higher. At 640x480 resolution it looks pretty lousy...but so does much of the Internet, so hopefully folks are using a higher resolution. If any of you are having trouble viewing the site please let me know.

thanks!

John

Long time, no entries

Yikes, I look back & see the last post I wrote was back in November...time sure does fly. My wife and I are expecting twin boys (!) in April which is one reason I've been extra busy (getting ready) but not half as busy as I'm going to be!

Anyway, the last post referred to an upcoming "Young Fogies" playlist -- that was put up and updated a few times and there have been many, many playlist updates since then.

You may notice I've started running a few ads on the site, in an effort to recoup some of my operating costs. I'll try to strike a good balance: to make the ads effective for the advertisers, but not overly obtrusive for my visitors.

I'm also running a few ads of my own using Google AdWords...already I've gotten quite a few new visitors, and I've only spent 75 cents!

I've noticed that the number of available listeners on the 40kbps channel has been exhausted quite a bit lately. If this happens to you, just click on the 24kpbs stream and hopefully you will be able to listen. I hope to add more concurrent listeners in the future, as well as possibly a higher-bitrate (this won't be anytime soon) but of course all these things mean added expense. We'll see how the ad revenues add up and take a look at these options.

That's about all for now -- let me know if you have questions, or if there's anything in particular you'd like to hear. The next major playlist update will probably be another banjo-centric show.

Thanks to all for the kind emails & Guestbook entries -- if you haven't signed the Guestbook, please do so!

Enjoy!

John