Found the perfect shot at iStockphoto, purchased same. Saved me from having to step in front of a camera myself. Thanks!

Still working on the rest of the CD process — recording is scheduled for later this month. Pre-orders, and bonus reward options, are available at the project's Kickstarter page. For everyone who ever said "I can't thank you enough for openmikes.org", I'd say a $10 CD order is more than sufficient :-)

The mobile site, m.openmikes.org is designed to be small, fast, and simple. It does one thing - shows you listings within 10 miles of a zip code, city, or address, on any given day.

Click on a club in the resulting list to see the time, address, phone number, web site, and any comments on the night.

That's it. Just what you want, 90% of the time. Let me know what else you'd really like it to do.

No, you won't hear about what the site had for breakfast, nor will it show you pictures of its cat.

What it will do is tweet each time a new open mike listing is added. Each listing will be tagged with its city and state, so a search for #Los_Angeles_CA will let you watch for new LA listings. Each post is also geotagged based on the club's address, so you can do a location search near you if you'd prefer.

Do you know a woman in her 40s or 50s who wants to reinvent herself into a singer/songwriter or comedian? To feature in a national women's magazine, I'm looking for women ages 40-59 who want to seriously pursue singing/songwriting or comedy for the first time in their lives. The ideal candidate will have only recently gotten her feet wet in her desired field (maybe she's tried out her talents at an open mic here or there), but should not have achieved too much success yet. She should have a compelling back story of why she wants to make this drastic life change-- more than just "I've always wanted to do it." If chosen to be in the article, we'll hook her up with a celebrity in her fantasy field to review her work and provide some guidance. Please note: We will not be able to consider women who are not in this age range, who are already making a full-time living in one of these fields or who have been pursuing singing/comedy for many years.

Interested candidates should contact Dana at magazinewriter@yahoo.com. Deadline: Monday Sept 28. Thank you!

He's looking to get something together in his vicinity, poetry-focused and -friendly. Check out his Craigslist ad to that effect.

Previously, you could edit the day of the week, the host's name, start time, and whether or not a night was still active. All that is still there, but now you can change a listing from "every week" to "1st and 3rd Sunday of the month", "every two weeks starting...", etc. In the past, this required my intervention.

Please let me know if you have any trouble with this feature, and of course tell me if there's anything else you'd like to see added.

The primary excuse / explanation / underlying misunderstanding is: this is a one-man shop. Hi, I'm Paul, and I'm that man. A man with a full-time job that has nothing to do with this site, a wife, two kids, and some free time, at erratic intervals. It's during some of those intervals that submissions get seen, read, reviewed, corrected, published.

So usually, the answer is a simple "I haven't looked at submissions in a couple of days. When I do, you're in." It's almost always within a day or two, but sometimes the rest of the world doesn't cooperate. This has been one of those months.

So what can you do to speed the process along? Hint: the less touch-up I have to do, the fewer clicks needed to publish your listing, the sooner you'll go live.

Want to make sure things take a while? Here's how:

Leave out the address, or give vague directions in lieu of an address

Now I have to look it up, make sure it's the same "Casa del Java" as yours, etc.

Submit a listing that's already here.

This one's easy — it will never be published. Add a comment to the existing night instead, if you have something to say about it.

Forget to mention the day(s) of the week

More often than seems sensible, I get submissions listed only as "weekly". I'll email and ask for clarification, and about 1/3 of the time I never hear back. Use your real email address, please, for both our sakes.

Include 10 pages of all-caps, unpunctuated, whitespace-deprived description.

I need to clean this up, at least a little, to keep the site from looking overly insane. Takes much more time than clicking "Publish", and gets deferred.

Forward a 3rd-person email with vague details about an open mike

Now I get to deduce what state Someplacetown might be in; find the address; hopefully find a phone number; try and guess if that's just one Friday, every Friday, the third Friday of the month... There's a form. Please, please use it. Thanks.

And finally, while emailing to see what's up with your listing may prompt me to check the backlog (generally 5-10 submissions per day), it won't necessarily move you to the top of the list. But politeness helps. And rudeness really, really hurts.

Selfish this time; grabbed a new switch to go along with the new pickups I'm putting in my Tele.

So are, roughly, all of the other performers. They're just more practiced at dealing with that.

Case in point. I've been playing for... argh... 35 years. And performing for, let's say, 30. But I'm currently in the leading-up-to-a-gig phase, and I, uh, don't handle it flawlessly.

Read about my nerdiness, and maybe feel better about yours. Then go out and play.

From my perspective — watching nights come and go from the listings, and personal experience as a host and performer — a couple of hints:

1. Have a regular schedule. Every week, every other week, first and third Tuesday, etc. "2nd tuesday except the third week, when it's on Friday, and an extra Wednesday if there's a fifth Tuesday..." will die, quickly, because no one knows when to show up.
2. Spread the word — here, elsewhere. craigslist, upcoming, Facebook — everywhere musicians may look. Preferably a few weeks before you start.
3. Make the rules and sign-up times clear — bad word of mouth comes quickly if people come expecting a different format, or show up too late to sign up. Singer-songwriters finding what turns out to be a full-band covers-only jam will not leave happy; nor will aspiring MCs who show up at a piano bar.
4. Similarly, players will love you forever if you let them know what equipment is available / expected. Are amps available, allowed, or forbidden? Can guitars be miked, or must everyone be acoustic-electric and plug in? And piano players will flock if they know a keyboard or upright is available.
5. The host can make or break a night. Encourage people to listen; praise one and all for having the balls to get up there in the first place; and please don't let your best buddy play his full 35-minute Seals and Crofts medley while everyone else watches and waits for their allotted "2 songs or 10 minutes".

What's up with that?

Did you have a hard time reaching the site yesterday, last night, this morning? Me too. The culprit looks to be some huge photos that were uploaded — or rather, the way the site was handling those huge photos. So uploads are suspended until some safeguards can be put in place. Sorry about that.

Updated 6/8/2009: fixed.

If you get a chance, I urge you to check out Matt and the gang live.