"Congratulations ! 
Your site has impressed us, and therefore you have 
been chosen to receive awards for 5 star commitment to 
Australian and International blues,  from Mr. Blues Online Haven"  12.7.98 
 
 
"CONGRATULATIONS ! 
After being nominated and reviewed, your site has been 
selected to receive the Music TOP10 SITES AWARD 98 
which is granted only to selected sites "   21.7.98 
 

The R&B Show page was established on the oocities.com site in the US. It was set-up simply with a Geocities web page editor by following the bouncing ball. Very soon I became unsatisfied with this page and this method's severe limitations, so I set about learning some HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).  There were few WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors available then, although the HTML tag writer Hot-Dog was around but I didn't use it. 

From then on the site grew as I discovered more blues sites to link. My second site was called  Blues Links , it has now grown to four seperate pages. 

One of my long term goals was to promote Australia. The other was to put the R&B Radio Show online in audio, but I never thought audio would really happen, because of the many problems involved. At this stage I had been doing all my work on a slow 486 PC, very frustrating (I don't know where I found the patience). Eventually I  upgraded with a new Pentium 120 system which left me cold stony broke. 

Early in '98,  Fred Davis from Tasmania announced that he had established a radio show on-line streaming in Real Audio. I asked him how it was done, he kindly gave me a simple non technical explanation. It took me some months to figure it out, but I was elated when I eventually heard my first show streaming live in Real Audio. The R&B Show in RA  has been up and running for almost six months now and is changed every six weeks. This has been received very favorably, and has increased my page HIT rate. 

In 1997 I realized that I  needed to cut up the Blues Links page. It had become unwieldy and was loading slowly. I realized that a logical split was to pull out all the blues bands, so they became  separate pages,  Bands in America and Bands in Australia. 

In my search for blues sites around the world, I discovered an Italian site written by Stefano which I linked and got a reciprocal link. Some time later he established a Blues Ring and invited me to join, which I did enabling me to discover many more blues sites around the world, and give this site greater exposure. More blues links and pages were added as the site evolved, it almost had a life of its own. Many times I've been disheartened with the lack of feedback to my efforts, luckily, on every occasion a guest book entry appeared from somewhere in the world praising the virtues of the site and thanking me for my efforts, which gave me a boost and  the pages a new lease of life. Its like a new business, it takes a fair while to get established. I now get quite a lot of feedback and interest with regular viewers, contributors and lots of positive response.  

 I realized that this  site, as it was called then The Rhythm and Blues Show needed a new name, as the original one was no longer appropriate. I decided that it should be something that was a play on the word Blue and something that was clearly Australian. The name came to me early one morning as I lay in bed Eureka ! I'd found it. 

Thanks to a campaign by the Australian government to promote Australia and its products overseas. Paul Hogan was known especially in the United States for the phrase "G'day ! Throw another shrimp on the barby". Further to that,  in Australia the word Blue is used in several different ways, it often a term of endearment, as is Barstard if it spoken in the right circumstance in the right tone of voice and to someone that you know well. Blue can mean friend or mate or even someone with red hair, or it can mean a fight. It is even used in the conventional sense,  meaning the way one can feel when somewhat depressed. As you might notice there is a very real vernacular in the Australian English language that is known as Strine. There are even dictionaries written on the subject. 

And so, to cut a long story short . . . 

The most recent additions have been  blues forum, feedback form, mailing list, site map, wots new and now this page, about the site. 

Recently I have been attempting to make all the sites more interactive and user friendly. 

My basic design principle has always been KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) and to keep in mind that good design is about communication not about technically flashy pages that confound, confuse, and take for ever to load. Its about logical progressions and ease of movement around the site. I constantly attempt to remove anything that is extraneous and consider loading speeds.  For further details see my page Net Tools 
.

For a long time I have toyed around with the idea of using frames and may soon write G'day Blue  in this form in order to provide an alternative presentation. There are many pros and cons to this idea. Until now, I could not convince myself that frames were worthwhile. But I think the scales have started to swing in favour of these. 
I have avoided frames as it would exclude many people who use early versions of browsers and operating systems. Also it limited the size of the page and many users get locked into a frames page and therefore tend to avoid them. 
 

Authored by Jai Goulding
Updated Regularly '99

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