Happy New Year from all of us at The Bluegrass Blog!

We would like to wish our readers all the best in the new year, while we strive to retain your support of our work online.

When you need to make a bluegrass purchase in the coming months, please consider patronizing the many fine advertisers who allow us to present the latest news and information online, 24/7, at no cost to our readers. These are uncertain times for the music industry – and for small businesses in general – and we hope that you will support the retailers, labels, instrument makers, events, artists and others who support the music online.

As we bid a fond farewell to 2008 and a hearty welcome to ‘09, there is a lot going on under the hood here at The Bluegrass Blog. We are working on a major redesign and expansion of our online offerings, which we hope to announce in more detail soon.

We had a lot of fun producing the Red Carpet videos from IBMA, along with all the other video interviews that we did. We’ve got some ideas for future video features here on the blog, but we thought we’d check with our readers to see what you think.

So here’s the question. Did you watch the recent videos we posted? Did you enjoy them? Would you like to see more? (OK that was three questions!)

[poll:10]

If you have any ideas for video features you’d like to see, we’d be interested in your ideas (just leave a comment on this post). We can’t promise you we’ll do them, but if there is enough interest, we’re considering making videos a regular feature here on The Bluegrass Blog.

We’ve talked about RSS before here on The Bluegrass Blog. I know I don’t use RSS as I should for the most efficient use of my time. So when a reader pointed me to this video yesterday, I thought it was worth sharing with the rest of the family.

The video is from CommonCraft.com and explains the advantages and how-to of using RSS.

Here are the buttons for subscribing to our RSS feed, as he describes them in the video.

We’ve been experiencing intermittent server issues since around mid-day on Sunday. Brance is on the trail of what brought them on, and we hope to have them resolved as soon as possible.

Sorry for any connection problems you may have experienced.