IMA Awards, updated site

Dear Friends, Listeners, Fans,

First, our Album "Zikrayat: Live at Lotus" has been named a Finalist in the 2008 Independent Music Awards!  I'm very excited, but I need your help: fan's votes will determine the final winner, and if we win they will make substantial promotional efforts for us in 2008, including selling our music in Border's Books.

So please take a minute to visit: the IMA jukebox at:
IMA Jukebox
and vote for us now.  If that link doesn't work, go to:
http://www.musiciansatlas.com/pages/IMAFinalist
click on "Album Finalists" and go to the category "Live Performances"
If you'd like to hear samples of other tracks from the album not included on the jukebox, please visit:
http://zikrayatmusic.com

The other news is, you can see for yourself, that i've updated and re-coded my website so that it and this blog page would be one entity rather than two.  I've been learning HTML and CSS coding over the last few months (in order to supplement my income a bit), and even though the website doesn't look that different--you can see the old site at
http://samimusicworld.com/archive/originalsite/index.html
I've entirely re-coded it into CSS to make it standards compliant.  The design is the original one by my wife; the new design doesn't change much visually, except changing most of the text into html rather than photoshop images.  you can view the source code if you like.

So, I know I keep saying i'm going to resume putting up regular podcasts (as well as the maqamlessons), and i will--thanks to all of you from all over the world who have written asking about them!--but it was suggested to me that i should actually start blogging, to keep fans and friends informed--and i realized that i haven't been taking full advantage of this page--i can put up blog posts in addition to podcast mp3s.  So this marks the start of that: i'll be putting up blog entries about what's going on with myself and zikrayat, in addition to podcast mp3s. 

Thanks for listening and writing!

Yours,
Sami