The jcshepard.com blog took a break this year as we worked out some technical details… and worked through the COVID-19 pandemic. We moved to New Mexico the first of the year, then went to work from home in March. August was a tough month personally with my mom passing on and with the site servers far far away. We saved the site (ahem, my beautiful web maven saved the site), but the page redirects are a work in progress! Who would have thought working from home would be so difficult, but the bandwidth gods frowned on my hopes and dreams for broadband at home.
Our top post this year is six years and three moves behind us now: Cheyenne-Laramie County, Wyoming, Historical Timeline. They cancelled Cheyenne Frontier Days this year. More important to our family, my daughter moved back to Cheyenne this year, had to postpone her wedding in Cheyenne, then moved back out of Cheyenne. Perhaps I will be back in Cheyenne in the coming year. We’ll see.
The most popular new post for 2020 was Absaroka County, New Mexico, posted from beautiful downtown Las Vegas, New Mexico, reporting on Sheriff Walt Longmire’s now shuttered office as the first round of pandemic shutdowns were (briefly) lifting.
Moving the site in August skewed the stats, but WordPress tells me we had 1,266 views from 952 visitors this year. We always get more traffic when we can post more content (makes sense!), so we’ll see what the new year brings.
Americana Music 2020
On the music side, I scrobbled more music in 2020 than any other year. Work from Home does that to a guy. I didn’t play so much of the Americana Music Association radio-play and awards nominations as usual. More Real Country music comfort food for the ears.
Corb Lund was the only show I saw during the year, and he got the most play and the top played track, “Old Men”. Erin Enderlin’s album Faulkner County earned the most plays, mostly because I bought that 4 months before Corb’s Agricultural Tragic (and that didn’t show up on Spotify until 3 months after that). I played a lot of Steve Earle, too.
RIP to the many great artists we lost in 2020. Kenny Rogers, Charley Pride, John Prine, and so many more.
Happy New Year 2021!
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