More Favorites!
There's a little feature that's been in the right column of my site for some time now called "Howlin' Hobbit Likes..." It's had about 10 items statically displayed for all that time.

Well, I've not only more than tripled the number of fave links -- and more to come! -- but also made it so that each page picks out three of them at random and presents them to you for your edification and delight.

It saves you from picking through a huge list and saves me from having to edit it over and over to put new stuff on (something I was conspicuously failing to do).

New Ukulele Site Launched: UkeWiki.org!
About six months ago, being tired of seeing the same questions appearing over and over in all the assorted ukulele forums, I thought how nice it would be if there was a central place for all this info. But that would be a lot of work for one person. Shortly thereafter I was looking up something on Wikipedia and had one of those "aha!" moments.

So, after months of planning, weeks of searching the web for the right software and days upon days of learning the software and typing in the first of the articles, early Saturday morning UkeWiki.org went live!

There's lots of available areas to fill in. If you have a favorite ukulele performer or band, write 'em up! Have a ukulele club? There's an area to post your details, contact info and/or web address.

Come visit and help UkeWiki.org grow!

Site Updates
I've made assorted small changes all over the site and two reasonably major ones.

First, there's now a sitemap, linked from the bottom of every page. You should find a link to every page internal to my site on the map and, hopefully, the assorted spiders from Google, Yahoo, etc. will be all happy about indexing my site more thoroughly.

Also, if you go to the music page you'll find links to a lyrics page for each of the downloadable songs there.

More to come!

At long last I've got the "fans only!" area set up here on the site. Hooray!

"But Mr. Hobbit," you say, "how do I access all the cool recordings, ukulele music and other goodies there?" Easy. Just sign up for the Hobbit Howls newsletter! Every month or thereabouts there will be a new password in the newsletter and I'll be putting things up there as fast as I can.

Just a thank you to all you terrific folks who visit the site regularly, buy CDs, booklets, etc. and come out to see me live.

Thanks!

Free the music!
For some unknown reason (that probably made perfect sense to me at the time) when I first set up the music samples here and on the Snake Suspenderz site I only made them available for streaming, not download.

This means that, unless you bought our CD, you couldn't take any of the tunes along with you on your iPod (or other mp3 player) and if you wanted to listen to them, you had to come to the site to do so. This is not to mention the fact that some of the tunes are unreleased as yet and even if you did buy the CD you couldn't take the tunes with you.

I'm sorry! Don't know what I was thinking!

All the songs currently available online are now available for download as well as streaming.

Thanks much for your continued support!

Small site changes
I've made a series of small changes to the site... rearranged the real estate a bit, made some things smaller, reworded others and even, in a fit of frivolity, changed the plain grey background to a spif grey music score.

Oh yeah. And fixed a couple typos along the way.

I kind of like the newly refreshed look. Do you?

Cheater Theory Update
I've updated my Cheater Theory doc to fix a couple typos and make the chord section a bit clearer. You can find it at the top of the ukulele page.

New helpful 'ukulele info
Recently on one of the uke forums someone asked about restringing their ukulele and I remembered a great web page on the subject... but I couldn't find the link! Luckily someone else did and to save you faithful site visitors that same hassle, I've added it to the available goodies on my ukulele pages.

New tunes at last!
After a way too long hiatus I've put up a couple new tunes on the music page (as well as doing some general updating and cleaning up of the place).

There's even a "radio station" feature so you can stream 'em all in a bunch.

Enjoy! (And hey, let me know what you think about 'em!)

And we're valid, too!
Apparently I didn't quite have the xml for the rss feed properly configured.

The old version of the aggregator I use didn't mind but the new version I just got the other night didn't like it at all. I fixed the errors (huzzah!).

So if you tried to subscribe to this news feed and your aggregator choked on it, try it now.

We've joined the syndicate!
In the everlasting search to make Howlin' Hobbit Dot Com the happening place for our visitors, you can now add this news feature to your RSS aggregator.

It's like home delivery for the Howlin' Hobbit news!

I have it set up so that any browser that auto-detects feeds will see or or you can do it the manual way by clicking on the little XML button, copying the link from your address bar and adding it to your aggregator's bookmarks.

Do let me know what you think of this feature!

May Day M'aidez!
To help you out with a bit of a clue on music theory, I've chosen May Day to finally post my long-awaited -- at least, by me -- Cheater Theory doc.

I've tried to explain the basics of such topics as scales, notes, keys and chords in a reasonably understandable manner. Please let me know if I it works for you.

Snake Suspenderz Artist of the Week!
Richard Hefner (of ezFolk.com) just dropped me a note to let me know that Snake Suspenderz has been picked as ezFolk's featured Artist of the Week!

Pop on over there, help us move up the charts and check out the many other fine musicians (ukulele players or not) at ezFolk.

Thanks, Richard!

Link section revamp
I've just finished going over the links pages and making some changes.

First, and most simply, I've added a baker's dozen or so new links to the collection.

Second, I added a new category, "Other Musicians". I had noticed that I was adding quite a few sites that were for musicians and/or bands I admired but, since they weren't ukulele performers, they were being shunted off into the "Miscellaneous Music Links" section.

Bad Hobbit!

Now they have their own category and it too will no doubt grow as time rolls by.

Lastly, I did some more of that "backend programming" work, "rolling my own" sort method for the links.

See, your computer thinks that all capital letters come first and then you do the abc's again with the lowercase letters. Since some websites have names that begin with lowercase letters, you end up with things tacked to the bottom of the list that start with letters way earlier in the alphabet.

It probably bothered nobody but me. But I fixed it anyway!

As always, feel free to suggest a site if you think it should be in the links list. If it's your site, don't be afraid to toot your own horn!

Howlin' Hobbit Sells Out!
As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm experimenting with ads served by Google in my right column here. A little attempt at monetizing the site, at least enough to help defray server costs.

There's still a couple bugs to iron out (like they don't look so good on a couple of the pages) but I'm working on it. As soon as I discover the secret juju php code to make them only appear on the pages I want them to, they should be fine.

I don't find them terribly intrusive but I'll see how I feel about that in a few weeks, when I'll no doubt have some other brilliant thing to add to that right column.

Feel free to let me know what you think, either in the guestbook or by sending me some feedback!