2003 has been an exciting year for Glorious Noise. And it’s all due to you, our readers. Especially those of you who take the time to give us hell in the comments and on the message boards. We love you all! It’s cool to see that people are enjoying this site. Looking back, it took from the time we launched in February 2001 until December 2001 to register 20,000 page views. Now we get twice that many people every month! So that’s cool. And thanks. Thanks for making it worthwhile to do this.

What follows are some of the notable things that happened with the site in 2003 and what you might expect for 2004…

Custom T-Shirts

Don’t get me wrong. We love CafePress and the ability to sell merchandise without putting up any money up front and not having to ship the stuff yourself is really handy. Unfortunately, their stuff is kind of expensive and you can only get white or grey shirts. So we finally got around to printing up a batch of custom shirts. Thanks to everyone who’s already bought one. Send us a picture of you wearing it!

And if you haven’t ordered yours yet, you’d better act fast. Most sizes are close to running out. Except XL. You guys can take your time. Apparently, GLONO fans are skinnier than we expected.

Contests

We were very excited to give away an iPod in our biggest contest ever. Thanks to everybody who entered! And big congratulations to Dusty in Labadie, Missouri, who won the grand prize, and told us, “Got everything today and man-oh-man you’re right I am a lucky guy. Ipod is great and the book and CD’s, holy smokes, Christmas came a tad early, thanks very much to gang @ GLONO. Best to the readers and staff for a safe and Happy Holiday. Rock On…Rocks Off! D.” Runner-up prizes went to Cheryl in Washington, DC; Andrew in Chicago, IL; Danny in Fort Lauderdale, FL; Tony in Rochester NY; and Scott in Grand Rapids, MI. Hopefully, we’ll be able to give away more cool stuff in 2004.

Reviews

Our Reviews page picked up a lot of steam in 2003. We ran reviews by newcomers: Paul Robinson, Quinn Slater, Tom Mantzouranis, Rachael Anne Liberman, Tristan Loper, Sarah Horne, Stacey K. Anderson, Aaron Williamson, Nick Latus, Nate Seltenrich, and Lloyd Nelson. If you’d like to write reviews for Glorious Noise, get in touch. We still can’t pay you anything, but we’re a fun little community of freaks. Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us.

Google ads

We added the Google ads back in July. The way this works is that we get paid when you click on an ad. We get a percentage of however much the advertiser paid for their keywords. The ads are sort of ugly, and we apologize for that, but it’s helping with the costs of running this site, so they’re most likely going to be around for a while.

RSS Feeds

Think of an RSS aggregator as Tivo for the internet.

We’ve been offering RSS feeds since May 2002. But we recently added an easy link to automatically subscribe to our feed with the RSS aggregator of your choice. Personally, I like Bloglines, a website that offers free tracking of RSS feeds. Basically, this is a way for you to find out when sites update their content. It’s very cool. Like Tivo, you’ll never miss the content you actually care about.

There was a recent article in Salon that sums it up nicely (watch an ad to get a free day pass). And you can share which feeds you subscribe to. Here are mine. It’s very cool, and it really has changed the way I use the web.

Coming in 2004: More MP3s

We’ve always believed there are tons of free, legal mp3 files out on the web. It’s just been really hard to find them (especially good ones). We’ve had a rarely updated section for mp3s since the beginning of GLONO. But it’s about to get updated much more frequently. With a lot of help from Fingertips Music, we’re hoping to provide links to good, free mp3s every week. This has the potential to be a very cool resource.

Happy Holidays

Things’ll probably be pretty slow around here between Christmas and New Years. We’ll try to get as much fresh content up as possible, but we’re going to be away from our computers for a while, so don’t worry. We’re fine. Ho ho ho. Harry Kringle to one and all. Enjoy your time off. Be nice to your families.