"It's A Victory for the Heart/Every Time The Music Starts"

"It's A Victory for the Heart
Every Time The Music Starts"
"Hippie Dream" by Neil Young

It's also a victory when the blog restarts.

Well, what a long strange trip it's been.

Last month, we alerted folks to upcoming changes here at Thrasher's Wheat. And we're pleased to report that those technical changes have been completed. Although not everything is working just yet.

So what does this mean to blog readers?

First and foremost, the URL to the page you're viewing has changed. The old "wheatfield.html" URL has been torn down and plowed under. The new URL for Neil Young News at Thrasher's Wheat is now http://neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org.

The new feed is http://neilyoungnews.thrasherswheat.org/feeds/posts/default.

Also, the Time Fades Away Petition page is now http://timefadesawaypetition.thrasherswheat.org. And Thrasher's Blog is now at http://www.thrashersblog.com.

The old URLs should be resolving cleanly to the new addresses but it would be a good idea to update your bookmarks and feed settings.

At the moment, we seemed to have not been able to re-publish archived comments. That should be restored soon. Hopefully.

To say that our 4th server migration since 1996 has been a nerve wracking experience would be a bit of an understatement. As luck would have it, about the time we began to commence on this, Neil Young announced the "Twisted Road" Concert Tour. Talk about mixed emotions. So that delayed things a bit.

Just briefly, the whole Thrasher's Wheat platform had become quite shakey with the seemingly never ending barrages of traffic for mega events like Neil's performance at the Olympics Closing Ceremonies which was literally a server melting experience.

With this migration, we feel we're positioned to provide a more reliable service without the increasing outages due to excessive bandwidth consumption. In addition -- and more importantly -- we think we'll be able to offer some additional features going forward with the new platform.

As the web becomes increasingly more mobile and socially networked, TW 4.0 will try and continue to evolve. We have no idea where this might go. Just like when we moved to the blog platform in 2003 and soon saw the commenting volume expand, or the more recent developments on the Twitter and Facebook fronts, the networking technology is rapidly evolving at an exciting pace.

Just to step back a moment. We'd like to iterate a couple of points. TW is only a single element of the Neil Young ecosystem. If you look over there on the right, you see there are a lot of communities and technologies forming the NY ecosystem with rust@yahoo.com still as the bedrock corner stone.

These days, good old email sometimes gets sniffed at by the digital elite. But email was the original "killer app" and will continue to be for quite some time. (How's that for going out on a limb?)

A brief aside, we'll quote Russell Simmons, Founder of GlobalGrind.com:

Social media is the new hip hop, the new rock and roll, the new equalizer, giving voice to the previously voiceless, the sound and thunder for social justice, the intimate forum for honest integration, which the new [World] yearns for, even before it becomes a physical reality - it is what the new [World] yearns for, what it aspires to.

Anyways.

We couldn't have done this by ourselves, for sure. So a big thanks to Roel over at Rust Radio for all of his technical support during this.

And thanks to everyone else who has been so supportive over the months and years. We try and respond to everyone's notes and donations, but sometimes we get a little behind and may have missed you. But your support is deeply appreciated.

It's you guys -- the readers of this blog -- who helped us make it through our various little crisis over the years. We couldn't have done it without you.

We've really tried to stay true to the reader-supported blog route, by avoiding advertising as much as possible.

Ever since traffic on TW began to really take off a few years ago, reader support has been a vital means of enabling us to maintain independence and devote the vast bulk of our free time and energy to blogging and not fundraising and other assorted technical administration tasks. As we noted during previous blog fund-raisers, this model of readership support for blogging and commentary is, in our view, very healthy. It permits us to remain accountable only to our readers, which in turn means that no external agendas or interests can influence what is written, and the only real obligation is to maintain credibility with our readership by offering honest, reliable, well-documented and completely independent blogging.

This model of readership support has spread rapidly as it has become increasingly difficult to sustain independent websites and blogs. What was once the province of public radio stations -- donation-supported blogging -- is now used by countless magazines, blogs, and journals. Even The New York Times has discussed ways to enable its readers to help sustain that newspaper through voluntary donations and other means of support.

Readership support not only makes the blogging we do here viable but also much more effective, as it enables much-needed assistance with technological tools for research, writing, and feature enhancements. Donating is, of course, entirely voluntary, and we hope only those who are actually able to do so decide to participate.

So your donations via PayPal are a great help.

We've only asked folks to consider making a $5.00 donation each year to support Thrasher's Wheat.

Just click on the link below to make a donation. If you do not have a PayPal account, you can use a credit card to make a donation via the button below (see lower left of PayPal screen).

As always, we genuinely appreciate anyone who contributes here in any way -- commenting, sending photos and videos, reading, email feedback -- and deeply appreciate everyone who has helped to fund blog activities here in the past.

(Thanks to Glenn @ Salon for fundraising tips. Thanks Marilyn for quote inspiration!)

We couldn't do this without you. Because we believe in you.

Be the Rain. Be the Wheat.
Thrasher & Thrashette