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.

Starting this Sunday (12/30), we will launch a new semi-regular feature on The Bluegrass Blog. Our UK correspondent, Richard F. Thompson, will offer comments on new Gospel music releases in a series of posts he calls Sunday Morning Revelation.

The first will examine Kneel And Pray from Mickey Harris, Rhonda Vincent’s bass man in The Rage, and will be posted on Sunday, December 30.

These columns will run as often as Richard’s time and the supply of new releases allow. Artists, labels or publicists who regularly service The Bluegrass Blog can send along new Gospel CDs just as you have always done in the past, and they will be forwarded to Richard.

If you have a project you would like to be considered for inclusion in Sunday Morning Revelation, you can send it to:

It’s been a while since we made mention of The B, our reader-submitted news page here on The Bluegrass Blog. The B features content written by our users, and we hope you will take a look and see what it is all about.

In fact, you might consider taking a look there each time you pay us a visit. You can always get there by clicking the link just under the image at the top of the page.

Any registered user of The Bluegrass Blog can submit news items for The B, and registration is quick and free. Posts are moderated prior to publication, but all submissions that are germane to a discussion of bluegrass or acoustic music - and are not profane or abusive - will be approved.

We invite anyone with news to share with our readers to consider submitting it for The B. Event or product announcements, concert/festival reviews, or any bluegrass-related information which isn’t likely to find its way to the main page of The Bluegrass Blog is welcome on The B.

Registered users are also entitled to post comments to any posts, whether on the main page of The Bluegrass Blog or on The B. Just look for the Comment link at the bottom of each post.

Click here to register, or here to visit The B.

Here’s a quick poll you can take. We’re just curious to know how often each of you stops by for a howdy.

You don’t have to be registered to participate, and the results will show right here without reloading the page.

John and I have been on a little road trip this week. The business of bluegrass brought us down out of the mountains of Southwest Virginia to visit Music City USA. We’ve been in Nashville since Monday afternoon, and have had a great time visiting with friends and associates in the bluegrass industry.

We spent a great deal of time at the Nashville Guitar Company shop in North Nashville, with luthier Marty Lanham. In addition to being a great guitar builder, Marty is also one of the friendliest people you’ll meet in this business. We had a great time talking shop with him and learning all about guitar construction and maintainance (hint: keep an eye out for a forthcoming DVD release).

Marty was kind enough to let me snap a few pictures around his shop. I’ve sorted through a few of them already and you should start seeing them show up in the header image rotation. A couple of them may be difficult to identify, so have fun.

The blog will be experiencing some temporary downtime today as we make some upgrades on the back end.

Sit back and relax. We’ll back in no time!

UPDATE 12:34 PM: OK, we’re done!

We’ll be having some hardware upgrades done to the server this evening that require shutting it down for a short period of time. The shutdown will take place this evening sometime between the hours of 11:00 PM EST and 06:00 AM EST. I really don’t think it will take that long, but that’s when I’m told the technician will be doing the work.

The Bluegrass Blog will be unavailable while they work on the server.

We’ll back and posting news first thing in the morning though, so you shouldn’t miss a thing. See ya then!

Be sure to take a look at The B, our reader-submitted news page here on The Bluegrass Blog. There are a number of new posts that are worthy of your attention.

In fact, you might consider taking a look there each time you pay us a visit.

Any registered user of The Bluegrass Blog can submit news items for The B, and registration is quick and free. Posts are moderated prior to publication, but all submissions that are germane to a discussion of bluegrass or acoustic music - and are not profane or abusive - will be approved.

We invite anyone with news to share with our readers to consider submitting it for The B. Event or product announcements, concert/festival reviews, or any bluegrass-related information which isn’t likely to find its way to the main page of The Bluegrass Blog is welcome on The B.

Registered users are also entitled to post comments to any posts, whetehr on the main page of The Bluegrass Blog or on The B.

Click here to register.

Our regular readers may notice a number of new header images in rotation today. I went through some photos from IBMA 2006 and added nine new images to the rotation.

Most of the new images you should recognize right away and know what they are. There might be one or two that make you think, and at least one that will leave you wondering what it has to do with bluegrass. Those who know the relationship, should enjoy a nice chuckle on seeing this particular photo.

There are now 26 images in the rotation so you probably won’t see all nine of the new ones until you’ve loaded the page quite a number of times.

The photos were taken by myself and our friend Dave Carney.

Enjoy…

We just recently noticed that the Email link in the post footer had stopped working after our recent upgrade. It’s fixed now. Not just fixed, improved!

Look in the footer navigation bar for any post and you’ll see a link enabling you to email the post to a friend, or yourself for future reference.

I lowered the interval length between emails from 5 minutes to 2 minutes. That measure is in place to keep spammers from using it. We’ll see how it works at that setting.

You can send the post to more than one recipient at once, just enter multiple names and email addresses, separating each with a comma. I tested it and it works very nicely.

The amount of text from the post that gets included in the email has been increased as well. The recipient will still have to click over to read the whole post and see any included photos though.

Have fun bloggrassers!

Looking at our visitor statistics, we note that roughly 40% of our readers are first timers. A good portion of these new readers come through Google or Yahoo searches, or from the many placements of our RSS syndication links on bluegrass sites all over the web.

With these numbers in mind, and in response to questions we receive by email, we have decided to post from time to time with information to help new readers take full advantage of the integration and navigational features we use on The Bluegrass Blog. Of course, new readers are always encouraged to visit our New Reader FAQ page, where most any questions that may arise are answered in one place.

Today, we want to talk briefly about Tags - what they are, and how to use them. Tags are like shortcut links to other posts on The Bluegrass Blog that deal with the topic named by the tag. They are typically included just under the post title, one line beneath the post author and date. If you examine the image of a recent post below, you’ll see the tag line, with tags highlighted.

That particular post discussed a YouTube video that featured Jethro Burns performing a talking blues tribute to prominent mandolin players, joined on stage by Red Rector and Bill Monroe. Each of the tags shown (Bill Monroe, Jethro Burns, mandolin, Red Rector, YouTube) would link when clicked in an actual post to all articles we have published about either Bill Monroe, Jethro Burns, mandolin, Red Rector or YouTube.

You’ll notice that this current post has as its tag, About The Bluegrass Blog, and clicking it will display a list of other posts we have tagged that contain information similar to what we have posted here.

We hope that our readers, whether you are new or one of our treasured regulars, will take advantage of tags to find more information of interest here on The Bluegrass Blog.

We just finished the first round of upgrades to the blog. We modifed some code to make things more effecient and easier to use. Most of the changes are unseen and you won’t even notice them, but there is one major enhancement that you might notice.

Those that have posted in our user contribution section known as The B will notice some modifications to the post writing screen. The interface now sports the upgraded visual editor as well as a tab labeled “Code” for those that would prefer to write html code directly. Spell checking is now available as well. Just click on the spell check icon and it will check your draft for errors.

The other big change is the way submissions are handled. Now when you are writing a draft you can save it and come back later to work on it. You’ll see it listed at the top of the page as “Your Drafts:” and can simply click on the post title to begin editing it again. Once completed, the “Submit” button now more effeciently tags the draft as submitted and it will be taken out of your drafts list and forwarded to John and I for approval. This is a huge advancement over the previous system which, I’ll admit, was somewhat confusing.

If you have never posted in The B before, all that is required is a simple registration and you can then submit your own news/opinion items for inclusion in The B.

Join today and help us blog about bluegrass!

You have may have noticed our new look. Early this afternoon John and I took a fancy and decided to redecorate for the holidays. It’s just a temporary thing and everything will be back to normal after the 1st of January.

Well…more or less normal. We’re working on a few site modifications and enhancements that we’ll start rolling out around that time as well. Nothing major mind you, just a tweak here and there in an effort to improve things.

Leave me a comment on this post if there’s a feature you’d like to see added, or something here that you can’t live without.

This is something new that we’re real excited about. I’ve been delving into rss and javascript and come up with a handy little way for you to paste one line of code into your own website and display the 10 latest headlines from The Bluegrass Blog in a stylish box that reflects the design of this site. Here is an example of what it looks like.

This little thing is pretty flexible and will resize itself to fill whatever space you give it. You’ll want to enclose it inside a tag of some kind that has a fixed width applied to it. A table, div, span, or even p tag will work. If you don’t constrain this thing with a width, it becomes a monster and will fill the whole page. The example to the right is constrained inside a div tag that has a width set to 200 pixels.

John has built a nice page with further explanation of how to implement it. That page contains examples of the Syndibox, that’s my name for it, sized in different ways, along with the code necessary to include it on your page.

Visit the SyndiBox page here.

I’ll just add that if it’s a blog you are running, you can probably just drop the script right into your sidebar and it’ll resize itself to the width of your sidebar.

Avatars are those small icons that are used to identify users in online discussions, or in more complex form, in many online games. If you frequent such sites, you may have seen them before, though the word, or its use in this setting, may not be familiar.

The term is borrowed from Hindu philosophy, and is taken from the word Avatāra, a Sanskrit term meaning “descent,” used to refer to the various incarnations on earth of divine beings.

Gravatar.com is a site that regulates gravatars (globally recognized avatars), icons that can be used to identify a user with the same image on different bulletin boards and discussion sites. We chose to use Gravatar.com when we launched The B, our user-driven section of The Bluegrass Blog, because it was so widely used, and integrated their system into ours.

Unfortunately, just at the time when we launched The B - and enabled commenting on all posts - Gravatar.com stopped accepting new submissions to allow them to update their system. What had been initially promised as a process of a few weeks dragged into months, but everything is back up and running now, and we urge our registered users to submit a gravatar.

Every registered user here at The Bluegrass Blog is automatically assigned our default gravatar, shown here to the right. It is a simple thing to upload your own custom icon via gravatar.com, and once your icon is approved (obscene, profane or pornographic images are not allowed), it will appear alongside any posts you make on The B, and any comments you add there, or to posts on the front page of The Bluegrass Blog.

Your custom gravatar can be a small image of yourself, your favorite musical instrument, your pet, or a graphic of your own design.

There is no fee to register and submit a gravatar, and we hope that our readers and commenters will visit Gravatar.com and do so soon.

There are two detailed festival reports recently posted in The B.

The first comes from a user who goes by Lynyrd Banjovy, describing the Jerusalem Ridge Bluegrass Celebration in Kentucky. The other is from Ted Lehmann, and it’s about the Farmpark Bluegrass Festival in Denton, NC.

Find both posts in The B, where any of our registered users can submit a post to be considered for publication.

Brance and I are getting ready to pack it in and put Music City in the rear view mirror. We had a blast here during IBMA week, though it may take several days to get our eating and sleeping schedules back in synch.

We have a few more photos to share, and expect that we can get them edited and published sometime on Monday. We may have some further impressions of the World Of Bluegrass events to share as well.

Don’t forget that any of our registered users are welcome to share their own thoughts about IBMA over at The B.

Thanks to all the IBMA staff and volunteers for their dedication and diligence - not to mention hard work - to bring off such a complicated and lengthy event with nary a major snag.

Thanks as well to the many readers of The Bluegrass Blog who took the time to visit with us at our booth, and shared how much they enjoy the site. We hope that we can continue to earn your trust, and your time!

A great big thanks goes out to Sista Smiff for her blogging help this past few days. We heartily recommend her blog, A Whiff Of Smiff, especially for Grascals fans who might enjoy the “back story” to bluegrass fame.

See you all when we get back to Virginia.

A look at the stats from yesterday and this morning shows just how truly international the interest in bluegrass music is - at least based on our readership.

Here’s a visitor map showing where our most recent 2500 readers are located.

A great many of the folks who have stopped by to visit with us this week in the IBMA Exhibit Hall have asked variants of this same question: “What is The B?“ or “How can I post something in The B?”

It seems that a recap is in order.

In a nutshell, The B is a section of The Bluegrass Blog where our readers get to select the topics. You are also encouraged to comment - both on the posts in The B, and any subsequent reader comments. You must be registered to contribute, but registration is quick, painless and costs you nothing.

Submissions to The B are moderated, so they don’t appear immediately, only after Brance or I have a chance to look them over. We want to ensure that the contributions are germane to the interests of our readers, and be able to prevent any spam or indelicate material from getting through.

Brance posted in some detail about all this a few weeks ago, so a read through of that post may answer a lot of questions about The B, and how you can be a part of it.

Please join in!