We passed the 2000 post milestone over the weekend on www.doublebassblog.org. It seems like it was only a few months ago that we hit 1000 posts…oh wait, it was just as few months ago (in May 2007)! That’s what happens when you put out 3-5 daily posts, I suppose. Here’s a snippet from that 1000th post:

How quickly time flies! It feels like I just started this blog, and it is hard to wrap my head around the fact that I have pushed that ‘publish’ button one thousand times (and many, many more times than that if you count edits, rewrites, and the like). Think about it—if you looked at each post on this blog for only one minute, it would take you over 16 straight hours to get from the first to the last post. That, by any standard, is a lot of content!

One of the great things about blogging engines is that all of this content remains tucked away underneath the external facade. The site doesn’t bloat with each post. All old content is neatly filed away, organized topically and still completely accessible, but leaving room for new content.

So, with all that content, how on Earth can somebody find what they are looking for on this blog?

That is the #1 issue with blog functionality: trying to allow for people to easily find content while still making it a pleasant user experience (and not just a card catalog for older work).

Read the complete 1000th post here.

There was certainly much more dramatic change across the blog during our first 1000 posts that there has been in our second 1000. We started Contrabass Conversations, began writing multi-part articles, and regularly began featuring bass news, photos, videos, and resources. We’ve greatly expanded our articles and gig stories (nearly 100 extended-length articles to date), have created at least one podcast episode per week, added video tutorials and lessons, added audio and video versions of crazy gig stories, expanded the virtual master class project, and added many other projects and resources throughout the blog.

What’s interesting is how I kept bringing up site navigation and accessibility issues in this 1000th post. Depressingly, this is still the #1 issue that I wrestle with one thousand posts later. Providing a navigation system that is clean and clear while still effectively pointing users to all the various subcategories of content and resources is a Herculean challenge, a evidenced by how companies like Google and Yahoo constantly wrestle with it on their front pages, constantly changing structural and organizational elements.

I’m constantly seeking advice from others in the field and tweaking things to make them as straightforward as possible, and I’m sure I will continue to do so over the coming weeks, months, and years. I’m actually implementing some new broad navigation pages (classical, jazz, students, and teachers subcategories at the top), which will hopefully help to organize the large amount of content here.

For now, however, I’ll provide some launching points for folks that haven’t descended too far into the rathole of content available here on the blog:

• In-depth bass features (audio and video)
• Original writing about the bass, the music industry, education, technology, and related topics
• bass news
• bass videos
• early bass
• luthier directory
• DBB.org links page (tons of resources)
• downloads (hundreds of MP3s, PDFs, and other resources)
• virtual master class project