Back In The Saddle Again

Anyone who has visited this site a few times is probably damn sick of hearing me say it: “The site is taking on a new direction.” “I will be adding some cool new features.” “I’m going to update it more regularly.”

Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I know, same old story.

Well, I decided to blow a little dust off this old site and clean up some of the mess. The RSS feeds were all screwed up — the old “Atom”-style feed was still working but the new 2.0 feeds were not. Some code on the bottom of some pages was producing some stupid error, and — not surprisingly — a new post had not been made in about 3 month or so.

Well, the RSS feeds have been fixed (try http://www.realrocknews.com/feed) and the stupid error has been fixed as well. And yes, I have even posted a few new items.

Once again I am going to put the broken record back on the old turntable (remember those?) and tell you that I am going to make an effort to update the site more often. In fact, I am shooting for at least twice a week! Pretty ambitious for a dead-beat like me, huh?

The difference this time is that I am actually going to create a schedule. As anyone who runs a few web sites will know, this business often has you going in a hundred different directions at once, and as much as a hate saying something that sounds like a cliche from the corporate world (gak!), “Time Management” is the only hope for me at this point.

My “Time Management” will be about as simple as it gets. A simple weekly schedule that tells me what I need to do for each day of the week. You know, like: “Monday: Add new content to RealRockNews.com”

That’s about it for now. Let’s see how it goes!

Classic Rock Search Engine

This is the first of the new features I have added to the site. At first you might think something like: “Yet another search engine. Big deal.” Well, this one is different.

What’s so different about this search engine is that it is not full of garbage. The major search engines do a great job of indexing the web’s content, but since they use automated procedures (often called “spiders” or “bots”) to seek out content, they tend to gather up a lot of junk along with the good stuff.

With millions of web sites out there, it would be impossible for any search engine to have people sitting there filtering the garbage out of their index. Maybe some day they will have programs smart enough to do it, but they ain’t there quite yet.

The other advantage is that this search engine is targeted. Very targeted. The only sites you will see results from are classic rock-related. I control where the content comes from so you will not see spam pages. You know, you’ve seen the crap that some idiots are tossing up on the web with little or no useful content and tons of advertisements.

If there seems to be enough interest in this, I may put up some other search engines as well. Maybe some that are targeted for certain bands, like a Rush (of course!) search engine where I would include all the best Rush web sites and blogs so you can search them all in one place and avoid all the usual crap you have to wade though when searching for stuff.

With a search engine targeted to a specific group you could search for almost anything and just about all your results would relate to that band. Say you were a drummer who wanted to find out what kind of ride cymbal Neil Peart is using in his new recording kit. You could go to the “Rush search engine,” type in “ride cymbal” and get a bunch of info about Peart’s ride cymbal without getting results for Steve Smith’s or Bill Bruford’s ride cymbals. You get the idea.

Go ahead and give the Classic Rock Search Engine a try. Like any other search engine, it’s free to use.

A New Direction For Real Rock News

I admit this site has been through more changes than it probably should have endured since I first brought it online. Since my last post was back in August, it is obvious to my visitors that I have not been adding a lot of content.

The truth of the matter is that I have a lot of other things going on with other sites that contribute a lot more towards my efforts to keep my bills paid these days. As a result, I just don’t have the time to be scouring the net for news to write about here.

That does not, however, mean that news is going to stop appearing here. I will do my best to post something I consider newsworthy once in a while, but more importantly, I have bigger plans for this site that won’t take up as much of my time once they are in place.

A while back, before the most recent site make-over, I indicated that I was going to transform this site into one that would help you find the classic rock information you were looking for and not focus much on original content. A while later, I decided to stay more focused on original content and managed to find the time to post here fairly regularly for a while.

Well guess what? Yes, I am going back in the other direction with some new features I am working on for this site that I think you will find very useful. I don’t want to say too much right now since some of these plans are still evolving, but I will says this:

Think up-to-date and automatically updated news feeds for your favorite classic rock bands. I also plan to add a feature that will give you access to the best classic rock info available on the net with some cool features that will cut through all the crap on the net that you don’t care about and take you straight to the stuff you do care about.

Hell, I might even add a classic rock store with classic rock CD’s and stuff. Probably through a partnership with Amazon, where I personally buy all my books and music.

That’s all I want to say about it right now. If any of this sounds like anything you give a damn about, check in here from time to time. I’ll post here as new features are turned on, so if you are watching the RSS feeds, you’ll hear about it.