Not only will it make for VERY entertaining reading, but think of all the wisdom, experience, and shared information that could be made available! We at BCT are very excited about this new project, which will be titled from the famous George Bernard Shaw quote: "Hell is full of musical amateurs; music is the Brandy of the Damned." We at BCT have always loved that quote, and it seemed to be just ironic and humorous enough to make a great new website.

Watch this space for updates as the project progresses, and be sure to use the feedback button to contact us if you are interested in being one of our bloggers!

For those of you not familiar, The GearBase's state objective is to provide a stable, safe, and secure place for owners of instruments, gear, and other items to store their ownership materials, serial numbers, photos, and other identification data. So many of us know we have our ownership material SOMEwhere, but how many of us can find it right this second? The GearBase will solve this problem.

Along with this, users will have the option of sharing the non-sensitive images of their stuff for viewing by the rest of us gearheads. :-) All images will be watermarked and won't be able to be reused by unscrupulous types.

Watch this space for further details!

The process of bringing the Trombone Forum Community Cookbook into the BCT environment is now complete. As originally implemented, all of the facilities used to generate content releases of the Cookbook lived on my personal workstation, and the product of content builds was uploaded to the web site. Here's a quick summary of changes I've made over the last couple of weeks:

• The source code has been added to the BCT Subversion repository. These materials can now be accessed by developers using the Subversion client tools of their choice.

• The build procedure has been modified to support building the Cookbook either on the production server or on an individual developer's workstation using source files retrieved from the BCT repository. This new build procedure has been tested fairly thoroughly (he said with fingers crossed) and, in the event I'm hit by a bus, should make it possible for others to generate new content releases of the Cookbook.

• Comprehensive system documentation has been added to the the BCT Developer's Wiki. This documentation describes the process of adding new content to the Cookbook and building test and production releases. It also discusses conventions used by the application and includes notes about the system internals that may be of interest to developers.

Members of the BCT community with a little time on their hands, especially copy editors and QA folks, are invited to hack the documentation as they see fit. I would also be interested to hear feedback from developers about the documentation content; if you don't think you could build a content release or perform system maintenance based on this documentation, then I still have some work to do.