Hurrah! Huzzah! And Other Words of Celebration
I am writing this from my internet connection. Woopee boys (and gals) I’m back.
Mostly. Hopefully.
I had to go with satellite internet which means my bandwidth is limited during the day. I get 10 gigs per month. That’s barely enough to meet my browsing needs much less my upload/download needs for this blog. Luckily they give unlimited bandwidth between midnight and six in the am. The thing is I am not always up that late nor do I plan to force myself to stay up in order to upload shows. I typically go to bed between 11 and 12 so its not too much of a stretch to stay up a little later and I suspect I will do just that sometimes, but not on a daily basis. If I plan things right on the nights I do stay up I should be able to upload multiple shows and then can stretch those out over the week and you guys may not even notice a change at all.
Of course I haven’t tried this out in anyways so who knows if it will actually work.
While I was sans internet I did do some bloggy soul searching though and here’s what I came up with.
1. Less might be better: Even before running into bandwidth issues I was thinking about posting less shows. For a very long time now I have posted as many shows each day as I could. I figured the more the merrier. More shows means making more people happy. It means that I have more to choose from and more for the search engines to catalog. Which means more visitors and users. Thing is I could never keep up. I have long since lost the ability to actually listen to all the shows I’ve posted. I’d like to slow things down a little bit and post fewer shows but be able to actually listen to and comment about the stuff that I post. My long term goal is to actually write reviews of each show, but for now I’d like to at least be able to mention a particularly good song or say something about the sound quality.
2. Fewer artists, less hassle: I’ve actually been somewhat doing this for awhile. Many months ago I realized I had an enormous amount of shows on my hard drive that i had not posted and made a decision to stop downloading (well almost anyways) new stuff until I had cleared out what I had. As time went by the number of artists I had left to upload became slimmer. I’m thinking of making that a bit more permanent.
I kind of hate that idea actually. One of the things I am proud of about this blog is its eclectic-ness, I love that this site has artists of all sorts of genres and doesn’t stick to just classic rock like so many other boot blogs. Hopefully I can keep some of that, but with so much madness going on in this world right now I am a bit leery of posting everything. Megaupload got raided, Mediafire killed me and now Rapidshare is enforcing strict rules not to mention the regular slog of legal action being taken makes me want to do whatever I can to avoid having my stuff taken away again. This means I’m gonna stick a little closer to the artists I know don’t really seem to mind having their boots shared, and will certainly not continually post artists who have made requests (to the file sharing sites, or elsewhere) for their stuff to be taken down.
Along with this I’m going to make an even larger push to upload everything I can find by a few chosen artists. Right now those artists are Van Morrison, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, but that list will change and grow as things rumble along.
Of course all of these are just ideas and I may go right back to doing what I always did.
If you are still reading this, let me finish with a great big thanks for your patience. I should have a show up tomorrow and then will see how it goes.
February 7th, 2013 at 8:22 pm
woot! woot! Welcome back, Mat! Glad you are getting the gremlins fixed and reconfiguring your blog posts to suit your style. Looking forward to it.
February 7th, 2013 at 8:25 pm
Thanks and I’m very excited too. I did lie about getting something up tomorrow though. I thought I had a couple of things on file factory already, but they see to have been deleted due to nobody downloading them since I never posted them. Plus my in-laws are in town and they sleep in the room with the computer and I aint waking them up at midnight. But soon friends, soon.
February 8th, 2013 at 3:52 am
Glad you have regained your internet footing, even if the new connection is limiting. Do what you want, when you want, we’ll still be happy! And, hey, if you don’t have Dead 3/31/84, you have GOT to head over to Live Music Archive and check out that Scarlet Fire! Jerry (Bobby?) leaps outside the usual boundaries of the bridge jam and the rest of the band stumbles at first but then gets it all together for several minutes of spontaneous improvisation before Jerry leads them into Fire. A great listen!
Hope you enjoy your in-laws!
February 8th, 2013 at 8:13 am
Very glad to see you’re back.
Many thanks for your great work.
February 8th, 2013 at 9:11 am
Thanks everybody for the kind words and to Seth for the recommendation. I think I’ve heard that show before but I’ll have to check it out again. Love me some Scarlett>Fire
February 8th, 2013 at 12:34 pm
Welcome back Mat. It’s good to hear that you will be back up soon!
February 8th, 2013 at 3:16 pm
Hi Mat, glad to have you back. I agree with Seth, post what you want when you want. If it’s something you like, then it’s worth sharing regardless of category/style. Best of luck with the in-laws.
Bob W.
February 8th, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Welcome back. I had confidence that at&t would be unable to put two and two together and give you what you need, but I am happy that you are back.
I look forward to your posting, musing and intteractions.
February 8th, 2013 at 6:53 pm
Welcome back.
February 9th, 2013 at 12:22 pm
hi
welcome back at blogworld
February 10th, 2013 at 6:34 am
Mat, I’d keep coming back here just for Van and the occasional Dylan show. You might find you enjoy the site more yourself if you post less. And later, if it feels to “samey” with Van-BD-Dead, you can always branch back out a bit.
Good to have you back!
February 10th, 2013 at 8:25 am
So glad you are back! Looking forward to continued GD posts. The posts I have gotten from this site have quickly become my most treasured shows.
February 10th, 2013 at 10:37 am
Glad your back.
February 10th, 2013 at 2:48 pm
welcome back Mat!
February 12th, 2013 at 12:01 am
Hope your move was easier than the internet fiasco. Great to see you posting and back in action. Whatever you feel is satisfying to YOU and keeps you energized to continue sharing the best music in the blogosphere is totally cool with me. More Van wouldn’t be a bad thing. Big thanks for all your efforts.
February 12th, 2013 at 2:55 pm
Great that you will continue to share your files.
You mention, one might say, a holy trinity of artists that you may share - - all I can say if thank you for any music that you care to share with your readers.
You’re the one doing the work and sharing it with the readers of the blogs - and we should be grateful that blogs like this still exist
Many thanks
G
February 13th, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Hello again Mat,
I’ve allready reacted to your return underneath the Bob Dylan posting but again Mat, welcome back. You are truly up and running!
William from The Netherlands
February 14th, 2013 at 10:00 am
Nice to see you back. Please do not stop mp3’s. It is all my computer will open. Anything else, i get a big Find message, which means too bad, jim. have a nice day. Some shows are much better than NO shows.
February 15th, 2013 at 5:37 pm
Cheers, the may take our internets, but they’ll never take our BOOTLEGS!