New Look For Fourth Anniversary

It has been a little over four years since I began Blues Historian.  It has been an interesting time, and seems a lot longer than that!  I have added a few things.  I have a Twitter feed, which I hope to use to give you quick updates about the blues.  Feel free to join up and help keep the blues world up to date.  I have also over the last few months added some other things.  We have a new counter that I started around January. It shows visitors from around the world.  The unofficial count from Google Analytics, is over 125,000 visits over four years.  I added a popular page and page view count as well.  those go back to July of 2010.  Finally my video Holly Golightly Blues has just past 20,000 views on Youtube.

Thanks

Tom Gary

Temporary New Look

If some of you are noticing the subtle new look to Blues Historian it is not your eyes! For some reason when I posted the story from the Central Iowa Blues Society about their blues in schools program it modified my whole blog. It appears to only effect the page that the post is on. Looking at my archive the blog returns to normal. I hope that once the blues in schools post goes into the archive then the blog should look like it did again. (I even tried to delete and repost the story, and it still did the same thing!)

I am not sure what I did, but boy did I screw up. Headings on the right side of the blog have expanded, links are now underlined, and the title of the blog has moved to the center of the page. It is very strange. At first I thought that blogger had messed with the template, but I noticed MacDaddy's blog was okay, so I knew it wasn't blogger. (we use the same template) I even tried to set the template back to its original settings, and that didn't help. It is amazing how one post could effect my whole blog, but it sure did!

Upcoming Reviews And I AM NOT SPAM!!!!

Just received in the good old fashioned snail mail a couple of cool items to review. First from Delmark records is a DVD Dave Specter Live In Chicago. The DVD also features Jimmy Johnson, Tad Robinson, and Sharon Lewis. I also received a CD from Miles High Productions of Mike Zito's new disc Today. Both discs look pretty cool so hopefully I can get to them this weekend and have a review for you by next week.

Finally, for some reason the bots that patrol blogger think that my blog is a spam blog. I have no clue why these clueless programs have picked on me, but it makes posting a real pain in the neck. They have these series of letters that many of you have no doubt run across, that you need to type in to post your post, but these are hard to read. It usually takes me three attempts before I can finally post. It is very frustrating. So I am a bit angry at the whole process and hopefully blogger will get a real person to look at my blog and lift the lock. AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Blues Historian ONE YEAR OLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today is the offical 1st birthday of the Blues Historian Blog! I started this adventure on April 2 of last year. I have posted 1,438 posts in that year! I wish I had put up a counter on day one, but I actually waited a month. However, with that in mind here was are my yearly stats!

27,774 Hits
40,143 page views
The front page has been hit over 16,000 times, and the most popular page over the year was the Taylor Hicks/Keb Mo Sweet Home Chicago video with 401 views. Taylor Hicks dominated the top 20, but Muddy Waters family guy cartoon, Steve Goodman's Go Cubs Go, and Bonnie Raitt artist of the week also made the top of the list. Once again a big thanks to all the Taylor Hicks message boards that have linked my site, and also a big shout out to Bluestown who has sent over 3000 people this way.

This has been a great year, and as I have posted before I never intended for this blog to be anything but a teaching tool for my students, but it took off, and has become my little promotional place for the blues. I hope the next year continues the growth of the blog, and I hope to see some of you at a few festivals this year:-)

Thanks for stopping by

Tom Gary

I Goofed

Well, I guess I posted too many Youtube videos, and now blogger's spam bots, think I am a spammer. I can still post, but with each post I need to jump through hoops. Hopefully this is a one time 24hr thing. I suppose what really set it off was my tagging all the videos. If you click on the video link under any of the movies you will get only posts with videos. It is pretty cool, and if you only want to watch some great blues, R&B, and Soul music then go for it. However, I think that must have set off the alarms at blogger, because after I did that then I found out I would need to jump the hoops.

Oh well, enjoy music.