My first blog post was in July 2014. I had early versions of the website up and running for about a year before starting the blog, so the site is just about ten years old.

It’s been an adventure building music4dance over the years. I’ve been thrilled when others have piped up and expressed opinions about how the site works. So for those of you that have done that, thanks! And for those that haven’t yet, feel free to get in touch. The more feedback I get, the better the site will become. 

My motivation for building and expanding music4dance has changed over the years. Initially, it was to retrain as a full-stack developer and take an (admittedly pretty weak) stab at seeing if this idea that had been floating in my head for years could become a business. I succeeded in the former, landing a job as a full-stack developer (or at least a hands-on manager of full-stack developers). Of course, the business never really turned profitable, as I’ve mentioned before.

Once I was working full time, I had to pull back on how much time I was spending on music4dance. I kept at it partly because this is a labor of love. But also because it gave me some coding time outside of work. And I could move the music4dance technology stack ahead of the codebase I was responsible for at work, which was incredibly useful at the time.

I’m sure there will be other transitions and focus changes over the years coming years.

The site itself has been through some significant reworks over that time. I moved the core database engine from Microsoft SQL Server to Azure Cognitive Search and changed the core client-side rendering from the asp.net framework with a sprinkling of knockout.js to vue.js backed by a thin layer of asp.net core.

This blog has gone through several iterations under the hood, but it’s been a pretty plain vanilla WordPress site for the whole time. The (mostly) invisible changes have been around how I have hosted the site, the most recent being that I gave up on self-hosting and now just run the site on WordPress.com. Over the last nine years, I’ve written 100 posts (this post is coincidently an approximate 10th anniversary and an exact 100th post). Some posts hold up pretty well, some could use a facelift, and a few are stale or just plain misleading. Given the vagaries of search engines, I dislike taking down posts. But it’s well past time to impose some order on the chaos, update some of the most outdated posts, and make it easier to find what you’re looking for in the mass of words.

So, I went through all the old posts and categorized them. I think I’ve managed a reasonable taxonomy of posts, although kind of like dance styles, not everything fits as neatly as I’d like:

About music4dance: Posts about the music4dance.net site features, excluding features specifically about searching for music.

Searching for Music: Posts that are about searching for songs, excluding those about special occasions

Special Occasions: Searching for music related to special occasions (Holidays, Weddings, etc.)

Music and Dance: Posts about music as it relates to dance and dance as it relates to music.

Reviews: Reviews of books, podcasts, websites, etc.

Archive: Posts that are no longer relevant

I also intend to go through and produce fresh versions of some essential content when it’s gone stale, like I did recently with the wedding music posts (part 1 & part 2).

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback and read every comment and email. So please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or about the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. As I started re-organizing the blog, I didn’t realize that an update as minor as adding a category would re-publish a post to my linked-in and Facebook feeds, so all of you who follow me on those platforms; sorry for the spam; I’ll try to do better in the future.