January 17th, 2007
Wow, it's been over four years since I started Sabbathlive. How the time flies! I thought I'd take a quick moment this morning to check in with my readers since I'm so woefully behind on e-mail correspondence and site updates. First of all, I recently purchased a new home. The entire process of selling & buying homes easily hijacked several months of my life. I finally moved into the new place on December 21st and have been unpacking ever since! It may take me another month to completely get settled, so this endeavor alone has dominated the majority of my free time. With the new home, there has also been a change in perspective...
When I first began this site, I had plenty of extra time on my hands to pursue all of the endless research that goes into creating a web project like this. But as many of you probably already realize, time becomes an increasingly valuable commodity as you get older. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that I have less free time these days. The truth is that I'm not as keen to spend as much time behind a computer monitor, since my day job already has me doing that.
I must also admit that I've grown a bit weary of spending so much of my personal time pursuing arcane references to Black Sabbath's history. Most of my close friends are probably amazed or bemused by the fact that I've been hyperfocusing on this topic for so many years. Unfortunately, both my research and my trading were making me into this obsessive compulsive person who wasn't all that fun to be around. I know plenty of guys who seem to do little else with their time besides trying to figure out what live shows they're missing or which discs have clicks or gaps in them. When I saw myself hurtling towards the precipice of my own belly button, I knew it was time to set the anchors and start climbing back towards the light.
I suppose this realization actually took place well over a year ago, just after I'd went to see Sabbath in Charlotte on September 2nd, 2005. 2005 had been an amazing year for Sabbathlive and myself personally. After several years of wondering whether anyone in the band was seeing the smoke signals I'd be sending through the WWW, I was invited to appear on JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE with Ozzy himself! And of course, there were numerous important discoveries in the tape trading world - namely the Dumfries '69 tape.
With all of this good fortune also came A LOT more e-mail. I'd already been receiving more than enough correspondence from Sabbath fans around the world, so these additional messages created an overflow. To this very day, I have yet to read every non-spam e-mail message that has been sent to me. I believe I had 140 unanswered messages at last count and I can never find the time to reduce them to zero. The main problem is that many of these inquiries are research related, so 1 message can take me 10 minutes (or more) to absorb and respond to. More detailed e-mail's can take me 30 minutes or more to process.
If you've written to me over the past year or so and haven't heard back, please DO NOT take it personally. When I do find time to read these e-mail's, I usually make a point to give a thoughtful response or at least acknowledge your e-mail. If you haven't heard back from me, it is likely that I haven't even read your e-mail yet. Longer e-mail's will almost get the back burner treatment from me, so be short and to the point if you expect a quick response. I DO care about each and every message I get and appreciate the time that everyone has taken to write them.
Although I always carry a small tinge of guilt about not working on Sabbathlive much, I'm not ready to give up on it. I have continued to pay my web hosting bill and leave my research up for the hardcore fans to reference. I invested way too much time into this site to simply pull the plug because I'm busy. My hope is that the work I've done will still have a life of its own even when I'm busy attending to other concerns. I do hope I will find at least a little time in the coming year to finish what I've started. For now, I will have to continue the work as time allows. The site may appear to be dormant, but I will continue to make minor updates and repairs in the background.
I AM very excited about the upcoming HEAVEN AND HELL tour, so I will more than likely be following that when it happens! That's all from me for now. Thanks to all for your patience and understanding.
When I first threw together the SABBATHLIVE web back in July 2002, I was flying by the seat of my pants! Aside from designing a "functional, but aesthetically unexciting" trading site and a personal home page (which my wife now administers), I had little if any web design experience. In fact, SABBATHLIVE was quite unlike ANYTHING I'd ever done before. When I first started out, all I had was the skeleton of a timeline. In other words, I never gave much thought to giving the site any certain look or design. Most professional webmasters create a sort of design template for each page to conform to or blend with. Me? I just made stuff up on the fly and left the slick graphics to Joe Siegler! And I mean that as the utmost compliment, as I've never claimed to have that sort of web design experience.
For a long time, I adhered to the credo "content is king". It isn't "eye candy" that keeps people coming, it's substance. Well, at least I hoped that was the case! Surprisingly enough, people have seemed pleased with my endless streams of text, so I didn't see the need to invest tons of time into the design aspects of the site. Just keep the interesting stuff coming, that's the ticket!
During the holidays, I looked over my pages and felt that the substance had far outgrown its primitive shell. There is SO much information on the site, but the design is looking more amateurish to me every day. So, I have decided to begin the new year by giving the site a slight facelift, at least for the sake of consistency. My biggest complaint about my web pages is that (1) the designs aren't all that attractive and (2) they vary widely from page to page. With that in mind, I have set about re-designing the site, page-by-page, to adhere to a certain consistent standard. Sure, it's a lot of work, but I think it will be a whole lot nicer to look at in the long run.
You can see some of my preliminary work by visiting the Timelines section. There, I have created new "shortcuts" to the various eras by thumbnailing the album covers that represent them. This has only been done in the 70's section so far. For even cooler stuff, check out the photo galleries under the BLACK SABBATH, PARANOID and MOB RULES era. I've added some album cover backgrounds for those and plan to continue this idea throughout the section. I'm also adding better descriptions for many of the photos in these galleries.
Also, I've switched over to using the "Georgia" font, instead of the bland and predictable Arial and Times New Roman standards. As a webmaster, you don't have many choices without asking everyone to install a non-standard font, which just seems to be a bit much to ask. My partner Paul used "Georgia" on his old site "blacksabbath.org" and I always liked the look of it. It's nothing radical, but it is a nice enhancement to the Times type font.
Special thanks must go out to Rich Grenfell, for inspiring me to think about this. He's also contributed some pretty cool backgrounds too!
If you have any comments or suggestions about the web design changes, please let me know. The changes will be slow and gradual, but I do plan on investing some overtime into this over the next month. I'd also like to finish up the 1999-present eras on the timelines too!
Okay, here’s the lowdown on the latest changes at Sabbathlive:
First of all, the site has now moved to a new web server. So far, it appears that my new web home is a bit faster than the old one. I hope this is the case, because I know that many of my gallery pages are a bit slow to load, especially for those folks with 56k modems!
Due to some differences between the old server and the new one, I’ve had to make a lot of behind-the-scenes changes to the site structure, so not everything is up and working 100% as of yet. You may notice that the gallery pages aren’t all coming up, especially for the cover art links. I’m aware of this and I’m working hard on getting this all fixed ASAP. The good news is that I will have unlimited space for new features, so there will be much more to come!
The other difference you may notice is that lack of comments for the Timelines, Shows, Known Audios and Known Videos pages. First of all, I started this site initially for the purpose of research, since I am in the process of writing a book on Sabbath. As the year passed, I found myself getting more and more generous about the sort of information that I posted on the site, especially in my texts on the Timelines section. And while it is within my nature to want to share everything that comes my way, it doesn’t leave me enough exclusive material for the inevitable book. So every submission has been a decision between what to post on the site and what to put aside.
The other issue of concern for me is that there are other aspiring authors who may decide to usurp the work that I have started here for their own book projects. And as much as I scream, cry or threaten to sue these individuals if they decide to stamp their names upon the research that I have done, I also have to accept some of the blame for making it so readily available. In fact, I’ve been advised by many to take down the site entirely if I’m serious about the book. For one, it takes time away from my writing, not to mention the potential for web thievery.
Regardless, I can’t bring myself to ending the site. I’ve met a lot of great people through the Sabbathlive project and I enjoy the wonderful letters I get every day, even if it’s difficult to answer them promptly! Plus, there’s just SO much material to share that only a certain portion of it needs to be saved for the book project. It’s highly unlikely that I would put everything on the site in the book, so I do think the web site can serve an important and complementary purpose. The site has also blossomed into a bit more than just a “live gig” research project, since I’m receiving so much interesting material that is not necessarily related to the bands concert history.
So, in order to keep the site alive, I’ve had to make
something of a compromise. I will
continue to update the known gigs, audios and videos information in a summary
form for quick reference. Since
these lists have become the definitive source for accurate info on Black
Sabbath’s known concert history anywhere on the Web, I think it would be evil
of me to remove them entirely. And
if you think I’m bragging, point me to a better one?!
I can say this only because I’ve been working on these lists almost
EVERY DAY for the past 2 years. (BTW
– I also designed the lists that are on Black-Sabbath.com, although those are
at least 6 months out of date at this point.
I’ve spoken with Joe about letting me send him updates, but he’s just
been too busy to fuss with those.)
With that said, the compromise will be that the details be saved for the book. I’ve cultivated a good bit of interesting stuff to flesh out and the actual day-to-day concert history, including first hand accounts from visitors of this site. If you’d like to contribute a story that you’d like to see in the book, send it along and I’ll definitely consider it. There’s a lot of ground to cover here, so there’s a good chance that everyone has at least one important puzzle piece for what looks to be a comprehensive concert history of the band.
The more that things change, the more they also stay the
same. I will continue to provide
interesting Sabbath tales, letters and stories as they come in, for there are
plenty to go round! I do hope
everyone is understanding of my need to make these changes, but I promise that
the book will be worth the wait!