Welcome to the new and improved Chip McCain Music!
An All-New Look, an All-New Feel… and One Slightly Painful Lesson in Backups
Welcome to the new and improved Chip McCain Music!
So, what do you do when you’ve allowed your website to sit around long enough to become stale, neglected, and badly in need of a fresh coat of paint?
Apparently, if you’re me, you throw the whole damn thing out with the old bath water and start over.
So that’s exactly what I did.
ChipMcCainMusic.com has been rebuilt from the ground up, with an entirely new look, a new feel, better organization, and hopefully a little more personality than the old place had toward the end.
Think of it as tearing down the old club, rebuilding the stage, replacing the questionable wiring, cleaning out the dressing room, and reopening under new management.
Except the management is still me.
So temper your expectations accordingly.
Same Musician. New Stage.
The good news is that I really like where the new site is headed.
It’s cleaner, easier to get around, and gives me a much better place to keep everything updated—including show information, my song list, equipment, reviews, photos, and whatever else I decide belongs here.
More importantly, I’m hoping the rebuild will get me back into the habit of keeping Music Notes alive and kicking.
That’s the blog section of the site, where I’ll be posting upcoming show announcements, music-industry odds and ends, updates about what’s happening around the website, and various other things that wander through my head and somehow make it past quality control.
And then there’s The Lounge.
That’s where quality control officially clocks out for the evening.
And Now for the Slightly Embarrassing Part…
Remember a minute ago when I said I started over?
I mean I started over.
As in gone.
Deleted.
Adios.
Old website, meet large digital trash can.
Now, anyone who has spent more than about fifteen minutes around computers knows there is one sacred commandment before doing something like that:
BACK UP YOUR STUFF.
And technically, I did.
Unfortunately, instead of making a nice fresh backup about five minutes before blowing the place up, I confidently relied on the backup I already had.
From months earlier.
Well…
Actually…
More like a couple of years earlier.
What could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out, quite a bit.
Somewhere along the way I had apparently forgotten the password to the archive.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, after years of working with computers, I managed to lock myself out of my own backup.
I’d like to tell you there was some complicated technical explanation involving corrupted databases, server failures, international hackers, solar flares, or Russian intelligence.
Nope.
I forgot the damn password.
Not exactly one of the brighter moments of my computing career.
Fortunately, I Didn’t Lose Everything
- I still had the original photographs.
- I had the source material used to build the song list and equipment pages.
- I even had an export from the Reviews plugin, so the nice things people have said about me over the years escaped the wreckage.
Thankfully.
I paid some of those people good money.
I’m kidding.
Mostly.
What I didn’t have was any practical way to reconstruct years’ worth of old Music Notes posts.
- Stories about different venues.
- Thank-yous to people I’ve worked with.
- Announcements.
- Random observations.
- Musical ramblings.
And probably several things I wrote late at night that are better left wherever deleted blog posts go when they die.
For now, all of that is gone.
I’m still digging through old files, notes, drives, folders, scraps of paper, ancient tablets, stone carvings, and whatever else might contain that missing password. If I eventually find the magic combination, there’s a chance some of the old posts will make their triumphant return.
Until then, we’re starting with a clean slate.
So Welcome to the New Place
Look around.
Kick the tires.
Check out the music.
Browse the song list.
Read the reviews.
See where I’m playing.
And come back every now and then to see what’s happening here in Music Notes.
After a long overdue rebuild, Chip McCain Music is officially back online, freshly painted, plugged in, tuned up, and ready for another set.
Thanks to everybody who has visited the site over the years, come out to the shows, hired me for events, requested songs, offered encouragement, shared a laugh, or simply hung around for the music.
I’m glad you’re here.
And this time…
I’m making a backup.