Martin blogging; new template testing

So this is what the new template is looking like. Hope you like it. There's more room, bigger photos, less fatiguing colors (I hope). A few bugs to work out. The main one being I can't get the header image to hyperlink back to the homepage. We'll fix that. I wouldn't mind getting rotating header images too, but it's not crucial, and it requires a knowledge of Javascript that I don't have. Hasta!

...I have to figure out how to hide this "Read More" thing when we're not using it, too

...Fixed? Yes!

All mod cons

I know a few of you would like to play music directly over the internet without worrying about downloading and importing and all that. To that end I added a music player on the right-hand side of the blog. Just click on whatever song and it should stream directly, if you have Flash capability. If it works for people, we'll keep it!

I neglected to do this earlier, but I also wanted to point people to my friend Kendal's essay on Oklahoma's 100th birthday (tomorrow!). It's thoroughly readable and original and for my money it gets at something important about the Oklahoma character.

Test Post

Pardon the interruption. We're playing with the settings a bit today.

Excuse the maintenance

We're playing around with the template a bit today. We'll have all changes final soon.

WELCOME!

And welcome to our very first blog post!

Before we get started with the tunes, here's a little background as to what we're up to.

As many of you know, every year Amy and I have sent out music mixes to our friends around Christmastime. The first one, in 2000, was more or less thrown together in an hour or two, and I think the only extant copy remains with our friends Gretchen and Jeremy. Since then, ever more thought and effort has gone into the annual ritual, to the point that it's fair to say making the holiday CD is our main musical hobby throughout the year. The number of recipients (and hopefully listeners) has increased every year too. Last year we passed out nearly forty copies, using up several toner cartidges and just about destroying Amy's laptop.

Which brings us to this year's edition. In an effort to simplify matters in our iPod-dominant age, reduce trips to the post office, and maybe even reach more friends, we're trying out distributing the mix via our very own music blog!

The idea is to operate it just like an ordinary music blog, except that the 18 forthcoming posts will all be thematically linked and ideally should be listened to in sequence. Once you have downloaded all 18 tracks from the website, you'll be in possession of this year's "holiday CD." If that doesn't interest you, hard copies of the holiday mix are also being prepared and will be sent on request.

We hope this works out and that it's fun for everyone. Happy holidays!