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.

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.

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.

Sorry for any connection problems you may have experienced.

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:

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.

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

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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.

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

UPDATE 12:34 PM: OK, we’re done!

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!

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.

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…

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!

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.

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!

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.

The term is borrowed from Hindu philosophy, and is taken from the word AvatƒÅra, 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.

The comments brought up there echo the thoughts expressed a few months ago when live show trading via the now-defunct bluegrassbox.com site was being discussed here on The Bluegrass Blog.

The sentiments are passionate and heated, and occasionally even vitriolic, but the topic is one that is worthy of your consideration if you enjoy/engage in show taping, or are a performer/songwriter who has concerns about the practice – on either side of the debate.

If you aren’t familiar with The B, it’s our reader contribution section of The Bluegrass Blog. Anyone who has registered here as a user can submit a post to be considered for publication in The B. We don’t automatically publish every submission, but we will approve any that are relevant to the topics we cover here, and aren’t profane or defamatory.

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.