Note: A much longer write-up is in the works over on my blog, and will be linked here. That will cover more of the history and work that went into it.
If you’re here, then I assume you’ve found this place via my blog posts about ESS. Otherwise, this probably doesn’t make a whole ton of sense.
If you’re thinking “Well this looks like Ken Rosen’s E Street Shuffle site”, you’d be correct. And if you’re realizing this isn’t E Street Shuffle, you might be a bit confused. Let’s start from the beginning.
Intro
Hello, I’m lilbud, or Brian if you prefer. And this site is the end result of my efforts to archive E Street Shuffle, a blog run by Ken Rosen from 2018 until 2026. I’m calling this site “E Street Shuffle Archive”, as this is exactly what it says on the tin.
This site is an archive of Ken’s site, with care put into replicating the layout/function to the best of my ability. Additionally, much the content of his site has been reproduced here, with as few changes as possible (mostly due to markdown formatting).
The E Street Shuffle Archive
As mentioned, this site is as close to a 1:1 reproduction of the ESS site as I could get, with slight differences due to backend, formatting, and some personal taste.
Nearly every post (minus a few) have been reproduced here. The posts were converted from HTML to Markdown, and then received a slew of manual and semi-automated fixes (too many to get into here). These fixes stemmed from some formatting oddities in the original HTML, which didn’t convert right to markdown. I tried to leave a little of a footprint as possible, and didn’t touch any of the actual “content”, which is the same as Ken wrote.
The post comments have also been reproduced, which I had the foresight to save a few months back. That way, the post and it’s relevant discussion have been archived.
The core pages of the site such as the index of original songs and covers, as well as the about page (which you are reading right now). The search function is also present, although limited to show only the top 20 or so results due to limitations with the paging system.
I did my best to recreate the “experience” of the site, trying to get as close to the original as I could with a static site. I aimed for 98%, with the remaining 2% being stuff no one would notice or miss all that much.
However, a few new things have been added. These were solely up to my personal taste, and to make the site easier to use.
- Dropdowns have been added to the navbar for site categories and authors.
- The “Cover Songs” page has a dropdown to quickly navigate to a specific song
- The “Original Songs” page has a dropdown to navigate to specific albums
- The search function is limited to the top 20 or so results, and only searches titles.
Changes
I think it’s necessary to detail some of the changes made to the posts on the site. I want to be clear that the actual content is the same, just that some changes have been made to formatting.
All links to pages on E Street Shuffle have been replaced with links to this site. External links still point there for the most part.
Images have been archived in a Github repo, and image links now point there instead of Ken’s site where they’re slowly being deleted.
Audio still points to ESS for the time being, as it’s too much to host on Github (10GB or so). With many of his books pointing to those files via QR Code, I am confident that those files will remain for a long while. However, I do plan on replacing those with Youtube/Archive links before the site completely disappears in a few years.
The only major change I’ve made is that Youtube links have a secondary text link listing where they point to. This was a change made so that if the videos were to be deleted, it is still possible to inform future readers what video was there so they can find a similar one.
Future and Closing
A longer post on my own blog will go into more detail about the process and the archive. I want to keep this page solely dedicated to the site itself, and not drag on too long as I sometimes tend to do.
This site is being hosted on Github Pages, and the source code will be freely available. That way, anyone can download and build/host their own copy of the site. I figure this is a better type of archive than eBooks, or a folder of markdown files, or a database dump. This way, E Street Shuffle will be preserved long term, and will not fade away.
I want to thank Ken Rosen for creating E Street Shuffle in the first place. I’ve said a few times that I think it is a very useful resource, and I’d hate to see it die without at least trying to do something about it.
And thank you for reading this far. Enjoy!.
Thanks,
Brian (May 26, 2026)