First and foremost, EverythingDulcimer.com is designed to be a welcoming place for mountain dulcimer and hammered dulcimer players and fans.

EverythingDulcimer.com was an idea in January of 2002, and by March of 2002, it was up and running. I guess you could say I'm behind it...sorta. There's more to it than that.

As you know the concept is for folks to enter and maintain their own peice of the site in the form of club, events, teacher listings and other forms of content. Folks enter their information and then change it themselves when necessary. They own it! Even the tablature and articles are meant to be submitted by members of the national dulcimer community. My role is to keep the site running and verify content isn't offensive, but not to provide content. That's your job :) The discussion groups are a fine example of the self-service nature of EverythingDulcimer.com. I knew this would work because I've been around enough dulcimer folk enough to know they are the most sharing and kind folks on earth.

My role in EverythingDulcimer.com is to facilitate the site and provide a simple conduit to the wealth of dulcimer information provided here and on other sites. So, I want my role to be as small as possible. My concept for the site will only work that way. This far it's going gangbusters!

A little about me...

I'm Bruce W. Ford. I started playing dulcimers only a couple of years ago. I'd seen mountain dulcimers in NE Georgia where I went to high school and I remember enjoying the sound, but not having enough money to buy one. 20 years went by and a lot changed. During those years I was alway one of those people who said "Someday I'll play and instrument" because I've always loved music of all kinds.

I visited Branson MO and enjoyed a week of being surrounded by music. Near the end of the trip I was exiting Silver Dollar City and there was a mountain dulcimer vendor. Being a woodworker, I decided to try to put one together and finally learn to play something.

More importantly, I got that dulcimer kit put together and started looking for a dulcimer club in my area. That brought me to the Dogwood Dulcimer Association in Pensacola FL. On my first visit, I met a wonderfully patient dulcimer player named Tom Asbjornsen (the inspiration behind the Dogwood Association). He took me and my 10 year old daughter aside from the group and taught us enough basics to get us started. The DDA is a fantastic group and we just kept coming to weekly jams and learning. Tom has since taught me much more and I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.

Knowledge of the mountain dulcimer led me to the hammered dulcimer. I wanted to learn as much as I could about my newfound interest, so I did a great deal of Internet searching for dulcimer information. I kept running across these "hammered" dulcimers that I'd never heard of. Curiosity finally got the best of me and I downloaded a sound file of a hammered dulcimer and loved it. I continued to learn about it from various websites until I learned of a local celtic music group in Pensacola which featured two hammered dulcimers. They are Sweet Prospect. I went and heard them and met Melissa Allured. I decided that evening that I had to have and play one. I made my first hammered dulcimer from a MusicMaker's plan and hardware kit. To this day, it's my primary hammered dulcimer. Melissa graciously spent a great deal of time introducing me to the hammered dulcimer.

I've been pickin' and hammerin' everyday since. It's been fatastic.

I've also been moonlighting making websites for sometime. I kinda fell into that a few years back. After spending enough time searching the Internet looking for dulcimer information it became clear to me that there was no national dulcimer website similar to some great sites out there for other instruments. There was also no good dulcimer discussion going on except for one listserv (for which I was never able to successfully sign up for...only error messages). I had the skills to change that, so the idea of EverythingDulcimer.com was born.

I also had an alterior motive for EverythingDulcimer.com. My day job prevents me from getting to many dulcimer festivals. I absolutely loved the few festivals I've made. EverythingDulcimer.com is a great way for me to stay in touch with what's going on in the dulcimer world. That's very important to me.

Here's some more on why I started EverythingDulcimer.com

So what's my day job?

I run my own corporation called Clear Science, Inc. I conduct research and consult on a wide variety of topics mostly involving topics of oceanography, meteorology and occupational topics in those areas.

I am also a retired Navy Officer (Meteorologist/Oceanographer).

Nearly all the content on EverythingDulcimer.com is served from a database. That's what I've specialized in my web consulting...writing web-database applications. For the most part, I used PHP and a MySQL database.

I outsource the web hosting to a company called hosting4less.com and I use Dreamweaver Ultradev to modify code and upload it to the server.

If you're in need of a web-database empowered website for e-commerce or other applications, please contact me. I can help, and I've learned to keep the cost down making powerful websites affordable to even small business owners. I do this by making website "back-ends" where owners can make day-to-day changes (prices, availability, inventory) and monitor their own content rather than paying a web professional to make routine changes.

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