…Aaaand We’re Back. Finally.

There’s that thing they say about the best-laid plans, and man, am I feeling it these days. When I posted my last little missive, back at the start of this month, I had idealized visions of this site magically morphing from its former state into, well, what it currently looks like now, in the space of a couple of days — no muss, no fuss.

Then it turned out that configuring the site the way I wanted to do it was a bit more of a pain in the ass than I’d hoped, even with the able, insightful, charitable help provided by pal Michael McDonald (no, not that Michael McDonald, or that other one, either) of {Yale Street Creative}, who does this shit for a living and was able to offer up wisdom like, “yeah, the reason the author-list thing isn’t working is because you’ve got a plugin installed that totally overrides it and screws everything up — quit installing plugins willy-nilly,” all without adding the well-deserved “you moron” to the end of his sentences. The new, WordPress-based SCR ended up being a lot less turnkey than planned.

Beyond the design issues, there was more fun to be had, and I now feel like a walking object lesson in the perils of WordPress. On the very weekend intended to be the “official” relaunch of this thing, some asshole hacked the site, scuttling all plans and forcing yours truly to play Code Detective for upwards of six long hours to fix the problem. Then there was the problem of moving the “staging” site from its happy little subfolder out on the server into the main Web folder; right in the middle of that, I managed to delete the whole damn thing, all by my lonesome. Thank God I’d previously downloaded all of it to my hard drive…

And, of course, there’s the logistical issues. SCR has been trucking along, in some form or another, for about 13 years now, and along the way we’ve managed to accumulate quite a pile of written reviews, interviews, & whatnot. As a result, they’re not all up here yet, I’m afraid — the original plan was to get absolutely everything in place before relaunching, but knowing me & my tendency to procrastinate and/or get real busy with multiple things, I realized that could cause this to drag out for years. Better to get it up, get it working, all that, and then fill in the blanks. So, if you notice things missing, please just hang in there & pardon the dust. They’ll get there, honest.

Now that the behind-the-scenes glimpse is out of the way, I’d like to present the new-and-improved, hopefully-better-than-before Space City Rock, Mk. IV (or so; I’ve lost track over the years). We’ve finally been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Web 2.0 age and have thankfully left a lot of the ugliness behind in the process.

A lot of what’s here will still look awfully familiar, I think, but the idea is to make it more usable, both for you, dear reader-type people, and for us writerly folks. For one thing, you can now subscribe to a real feed for the site, one that includes not just posts but also reviews, show writeups, & the rest: http://www.spacecityrock.com/?cat=3,4,8,14,62&feed=rss2.

That one alone has been a loooong time coming, as has the ability to comment on pretty much everything that goes up here and share any of it via your favorite “social media” whatsits. Oh, and we’re finally using tags the way they were intended, which’ll help in finding stuff on our site. And WP supports Gravatars, so if you’ve got one set up, it should appear next to any comments you make. Possibly best of all, the new site’ll enable us (meaning “me,” primarily) to put up reviews & interviews in a much more timely manner than we’ve been able to in the past.

At any rate, that’s about it — welcome to the new site, which is like the old but better. Check it out, let us know what you think of it, etc.; this is still going to be a work-in-progress for quite a while, and we’re open to suggestions.

Big, big thank-yous, by the way, to all the folks who either prodded this redesign thing forward or helped make it happen, including my lovely wife, the aforementioned Mr. McDonald, the ever-energetic {Matthew Wettergreen} and his cohort Philip Beck, David Cobb of {Houston Calling}, and all the awesome people who write for this site. Thanks, everybody!