Stop Standing Still - BETA

As you’ve probably noticed, this site has been kind of dead for the past couple of weeks. I wanted to apologies for that and offer an explanation as well as a little hope for the future of the site. This project isn’t abandoned, it has just been moved to the back burner as real life issues take precedence.

This past fall has been pretty crazy both in how busy I’ve been and how much stress I’ve been dealing with. I’m keeping things together, but the site has suffered because of it.

The story begins back in the beginning of October when I started a new job. My day job is as a database programmer and it’s a job that I thoroughly enjoy doing. The new job has been fun so far, but it has also been busy since we’re a little short handed right now. On top of this there are several large databases that I’m trying to wrap my brain around. So that’s been good part of the stress and lack of time that I’ve been dealing with.

On top of this, right around the time that I launched this site, I started the process of buying my first house. Things have happened pretty quickly in that regard and I’m now waiting to find out when I’m going to settle on a nice little house in central MD. It is going to be cool once I own the house and have moved in, but getting there has been a comedy of false starts and hurrying up to wait. I was originally hoping to close at the end of November, but now will be happy if I own the place before New Years.

Alone, any of these three things (job, site, house) would leave me with my hands full. I came up with the bright idea to do all three at once though. On the plus side, this sets me up for 2008 to be a pretty kick ass year. On the minus side, it turned out to be more then I could handle on my own. As a result, I blew the launch of this site pretty hard. I apologies for that.

Now all of this isn’t to say I’ve been completely neglecting the site. Instead of working on entering dates, I’ve been focusing on the back end for the site. I’ve built what I hope will be some nice tools to make finding shows easier for people. I’m currently working on trying to make entering dates into the system a little easier for me, which will make it easier to keep this site up to date. I’m also contemplating how best to handle giving bands/artists/promoters access to the back end so that they can enter their own dates into the system.

With everything going on, I’ve decided to cut my loses and just let the site lay fallow for the next couple of weeks while I focus on other things. After I’ve moved into my house and gotten set up, I am going to relaunch the site with the new tools and possibly a new look. Assuming that I do settle on the house by the end of the month, this will probably happen in mid to late January (I need to paint and replacing carpeting before I can move in). Those of you who have linked directly to the calendar application will probably want to change your bookmarks/links to the main page so that you know when things have switched over to the new application.

So, that’s the state of Stop Standing Still at the moment. Again, I apologies for dropping the ball here. Especially to all the folks who have been cool enough to send me information on dates or helped to spread the word. I really do appreciate what you’ve done for me and the site. I also promise that the site will be back in early ‘08 and will be even better then before.