For those of you coming here from the Ground & Sky main site, welcome to the redesigned blog! It’s still a work in progress - the banner at the top will change (until very recently I had the blog on a black background; now that I’ve changed it to make it easier to read, I need a new idea for a banner), and I’m still not quite done tagging and categorizing all the old entries. Lots of the old internal links will not work right now, either.

I’ve ported nearly 10 years’ worth of blog posts into this new platform, but unfortunately have not been able to move the old comments over. That might happen eventually, but not yet.

As for Ground & Sky itself, it is dormant but not completely dead. You’ll notice a few new reviews posted today (thanks Joe!). I will be periodically posting reviews still, but no promises as to frequency of updates. I’m still trying to figure out a good balance between contributing to the Washington City Paper, where I’ve been blogging for a few months as well as writing the occasional review for the print edition, and continuing work on Ground & Sky.

I have had enough people ask “what happened to Ground & Sky?” to convince me that it’s certainly an endeavor worth continuing. Thank you all for your interest. Please subscribe to this feed and keep your eyes open for new stuff at the site!

My old blogging “platforms” did not support post titles, per se (the date and time of the post stood in as the title). I am in the process of literally going through every single old post and adding a title (this is as much for my reference, and my entertainment, as anything else). Until I get through with that task, the old posts may look kind of weird in this current layout.

Said layout, also, is likely to change, so don’t get too used to it.

Finally, I am looking into the feasibility of importing all the old comments into the new system. This may or may not be doable with a minimum of pain, and for this particular enterprise I don’t think my pain tolerance is going to be too high.

Until these things are done, this new blog platform won’t officially go live, but I’ve activated Technorati integration etc already, so I know folks will find their way here before then. For those of you: this thing is still in a preliminary stage.

It’s kind of amazing to this that this blog contains my scattershot ramblings on music over almost the last decade. Looking back, I’ve written more than my share of asinine and embarrassing crap, but some of this is pretty entertaining.

Anyway, in 1999 this thing started as a static HTML page that I updated manually, on a clunky website using HTML frames (those were the bad old days). By 2002 I had rewritten the entire website to be at least slightly dynamic, using PHP scripts to read data from text files (still no database-driven content), and the blog followed suit. Somewhere around 2005 I kicked around the idea of using PHP and MySQL to recreate the website in a database-driven form, and even started writing my own blogging platform. However, I didn’t have the time or motivation to see it through, and in part I’m glad, because there are now lots of blogging platforms out there far superior to anything I could possibly write.

So after a couple relatively painless hours of work I’ve ported all the content from my blog into this WordPress blog, thus bringing it into the Web 2.0 era. Still got to nail down what look & feel I want (right now this is just the same thing I use for my photography blog), but getting the content moved is a good start. Hopefully this means I’ll actually start writing in this thing again, at least occasionally - looking back over the last 9 years of posts convinced me that this is something worth keeping up.