Content Changes
The most apparent change any long-time readers may have noticed this year (if any of you are left) may have noticed is that the site’s direction has shifted to covering more of the Korean side of music rather than the Japanese side.
This mainly concerns the departure of staff who covered the Japanese side of music. When the idol bubble burst, that was it for consistent coverage. Japanese music has been relatively stagnant, and not a lot has interested me in 2022.
Korean music, on the other hand, I find much more exciting, even if it is a bit more paint by numbers compared to the wild west that is Japan. It is at least sonically pleasing, so it has captured more of my attention this year.
Because the server this site was previously hosted on was being decommissioned due to aging out, I had to purchase a brand new one and migrate everything over to it.
This migration allowed me to do a long overdue cleanup of the post and image databases. First, however, I had to decide what to keep and archive. After looking at what resources I had on my new server and the type of things that visitors were most frequently reading, I decided on the following:
- Cap the live archive to ten years back. That seems reasonable for a site that has been around as long as we have.
- Archive old news articles and take them offline. As great as these are for historical purposes, they also take up precious space on the server. I can’t afford to keep 16 years of articles live.
- Trim the fat. This will probably upset the last batch of previous contributors to the site, but I had to shelve many of their posts and take them offline with a few exceptions. Looking at where the site is headed into the future, it was an executive decision to keep only the most relevant material up. Of course, my old posts were not exempt from this, so take comfort that everyone’s work was on the chopping block.
My goal next year is to have at least one article up a week outside of the random remix or monthly house mix. Looking at how proficient I was in the past while going through the archives, I wondered what killed my writing passion.
I will work on re-igniting that spark starting in the new year.
