As the holiday this website celebrates makes its arrival, I'd like to thank all the folks who have stuck with us, especially this year, when technical snafus threatened to kill this website outright. The problems were partly my own fault -- I let the software that runs this website go too long without upgrades, mainly because the original vendor abandoned the hobbyist market and began charging enterprise prices for their goods. Rectifying that cost me a couple weeks of posting time. Then, when I managed to successfully patch things with the last known free version of the software, I discovered my hosting plan only allowed me to write a finite number of files to the server, and I had long exceeded my limit. That cost me another week of posts until customer service simply changed my plan -- and saved me a couple bucks in the process while allowing me to get Mistletunes back on the information superhighway once more.
I'm starting to feel age creeping up on me, mainly in regard to what seems like the ebbing relevance of what I once considered to be a great idea for an underserved market -- rock 'n roll Christmas music reviews. Hell, I'm still making a physical disc of my annual Christmas mix, even as fewer people have CD players in their homes or cars. But then, I'm still listening to rock 'n roll, even as those of us who still do that are regarded by our younger peers the same way we once regarded our weird uncles with their Sauter-Finnegan records.
So while I doubt the original premise of this website would pass muster with your average focus group as a good idea, or even a comprehensible one, I'm going to keep doing it for the foreseeable future, if only to justify the amount of time I spent on hold with technical support in the past two months. If you still find this site provides you with value, please do me the small favor of routing your Amazon orders through this website. (I'll be replacing the more prominent Amazon links, and maybe even the original website banner, once I figure out what I'm doing again; webmastering skills really don't stay with a guy if you're not building new sites from scratch three or four times a year.)
In the meantime, please enjoy this bit of mash-up holiday weirdness, have a happy holiday, and don't be a stranger.
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