• I’m trying to make it easier to discover interesting older material — AYoS has over 400 posts, most featuring impromptu, acoustic recordings of my  150+ songs, many accompanied by microprose that meanders between fiction and autiobiography. Incredibly — I’m more surprised than anyone — there have been over 500,000 downloads of AYoS songs from Archive.org since the Fall Equinox 2005, when A Year of Songs was founded. (I imagine that means 499,000 people stabbing the kill button, but a half million clicks is a half million clicks, you know?)

• The new Random Post (on the main menu) will send you hurtling back through time to a randomly selected  post from the last 7 years.

• And finally it’s kind of fun using the new Post Shuffle — the thumbnail menu near the top of the right sidebar. You’ll see a different selection of posts each time a page loads. I find it almost hypnotic to click my way randomly through my own blog…

• One last thing, if you’re a newcomer to AYoS and, well… you’re wondering, reasonably enough… let me put your mind to ease: Yes, I know I’m not much of a singer. I like to think I have a songwriter’s voice — if you listen hard enough, you can probably figure out what notes I meant.

Lost? You’ve stumbled into AYoS 2.0 alpha (as in, not even beta) … we’re wearing a working skin and many of our links will lead you back to the legacy AYoS site, but we’ve managed to get all of our 400 plus previous blog posts into the new format… we think… UPDATE: We’re now live!

Longing for AYoS 1.0? Click here.

Didn’t there used to be this folkie dude who had a bunch of songs about cheating, losing, getting drunk, and cheating and these little story things along with the songs that sometimes had something to do with them and sometimes didn’t?

I’m sure there was.

Anyhow, this seems like as good a time as any to make some transitions.

For one thing, circumstances beyond my control mean I gotta. Google, who owns the Blogger platform have decided they no longer have the expertise to support FTP updates to existing Blogger-using websites. No kidding. That is actually, in essence,  what they said when they told about 10% of their users that they could no longer support blogs on individual websites. Users like AYoS are welcome to try to migrate their existing content to the Google/Blogger servers. Cynics suggested that this is really about Google’s fabled lust for content hegemony — but if Google says they don’t have the expertise to support the same service that Blogger (who they bought some time ago) never had any problem providing, who am I to argue. I guess they know their practical limitations, huh?

Whatever.

That said, I’ve chafed against the clumsy limitations of the Blogger platform almost since the beginning, going so far as to write my own ancillary database applications to support better targeted searching and navigation options. And, really, I had a pretty slick little system. If you look at the bulk of the posts here at AYoS, you’ll see that there were a number of features in most of them, a variety of downloading and streaming options, various playlist and player options. There’s a lot of infrastructure that I designed into my process here and I’m not cavalier about leaving it behind.

But the time has really come.

In real life, I’ve been using the WordPress platform using one of my business site’s databases and servers and it is a far more flexible, powerful, extensible platform that simultaneously is easier in many respects and is also much more customizable.

I’m still a bit up in the air, but in all likelihood, what will happen is that I will preserve the old content in its familiar form (it’s on my site, not Blogger’s, so that part’s a done deal) but then create an improved navigation system for the old content.

What’s really up in the air is whether AYoS will move forward with new content or if I’ll do a little curatin’ (or do we call that editing in the blog world?) trimming down the number of songs available (there are some I know I don’t much want to hear again) and sorting through the micro-fiction and essays, maybe even mixing and rematching a little and then rigging things up to rotate the content every few days or so. (If you have any ideas or preferences, don’t be afraid to leave a comment or PM me.)