NOTE: We are now moving to version 3.0, based on Craft CMS.

We Deleted Posts with Dead Links

I found out as I started looking through some historical posts that over time, about 10-15% of you (people who send me songs to review, that is) tend to either change the link, or pull the song. Can I tell you about the time that dude from Tonic sent me a song, and then ghosted me for 3 months? These thing happen all the time - people just change their minds. No worries here. I am only love. But I don’t like to waste time, and I don’t like when the site looks bad - like with dead links. So if your post is gone, it is because your link was no longer active.

So what does that mean? Well, secretly, and in the dead of night, I am porting pretty much every dang review I wrote in the last 15 months, from Squarespace to Ghost. And that’s a lot. Not sure of the final numbers yet, but I am just moving records over from July 2018 - I have 4 months under my belt so far - and I already have 200+ records that have come over. It is a massive task, but I am enjoying it because I like revisiting with some old loves, so to speak. These are some of the first songs that spoke to me in my blogging career, and for that I already have a sense of nostalgia. It’s only been about a year and half so far - but we have come a long way.

What’s new? This is a true 2.0 rollout, in the sense that I have a full handle on what my tech needs are now, as well as a full handle on what the visual aesthetic needs to be, so it is a completely new platform I have been working on, in the shadows, for 3 months now. One of the main new features is the usage of tags within the UI. Visitors will finally be able to track their favorite songs by genre and region with tag-specific pages and rss feeds. It is also a massive improvement in terms of page-load speeds, and I expect both of those things to help prop up user engagement.

And it is kind of fun to look back at some old posts, just for historical perspective - some bands are still around, and some aren’t. Right now you have access to Feb - June of 2018, if you are curious what that looks like, just click below.

(Link removed)

Those of you that understand security certificates will know why we took this approach - as the records get moved over to 2.0 in the background, the old server will remain until all the records have processed. At that point, the DNS will be updated, and CHILLFILTR.com will move to 2.0, and the old server will go away.

So that’s why the writing schedule has been a bit slow lately - but by the end of this month, we will be on the new platform, and my productivity will go up considerably. Thanks for your patience with this transition - and as always, thanks for supporting independent music.