Category: Site News

Help me broadcast annoying Flash ads to you!

So I signed up for the blog reader demographics survey. I’ve never really done much research into who the readers of this site are. I was collecting some demographic data when the old Audiobins were around, and back then, the average age of the typical Musicwhore.org reader was 18 years old.

Yeah. Shocked me too.

But that was five years ago. I don’t know who’s reading now, especially after the drastic redesign of 2005. So I’m giving this blog survey thing a try. Please help me unduly influence my editorial judgment!

UPDATE: To seed the survey, I took it myself. It takes a while to get through. Just mentioning.

meta.musicwhore.org

Vanity searches and referral logs sometimes uncover wonderful feedback about this site.

Over at the Japanese Music Room boards for the like-named Soulseek community, I’ve heard tell of difficulties with site navigation. I have to say as a user, I miss some of the functionality of the old site. As a content provider, I’m all too happy to have drastically reduced my work load.

One thing I don’t really advertise is that the old site is actually updated with new reviews. When I post a new review, I’ll link from the archive site to this one. That way, folks who find stuff there can wander their way over here. If you’d rather find content by band name, you can still visit the old site to find reviews published here. Right now only reviews and release news items are linked from the archive. Other content might be added if it seems right to do so.

I really should explain the category names, which I will probably do here in the distant future (i.e. after I get back from vacation.)

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Neglectful

Yes, it’s been quiet here at Musicwhore.org headquarters. I could hide behind an excuse of preserving my energy for SXSW, but the truth of the matter is my attention has been distracted by non-blogging toys.

I’m far enough behind with "365 Days, 365 Files" that I’m pretty sure it’ll be more like "330 Files" or "298 Files". I’ve already decided not to post audio entries during SXSW, and in late April, I’m heading to Honolulu for a week. I’ll most likely not have access to a computer, so I won’t be posting at all.

SXSW starts tomorrow night. See you then!

Subscription has its privileges

I’m not sure how I got in the habit of putting the links to sound files at the end of entries and never on the front page of this site. In fact, I think the convention for MP3 blogs is to put the link at the very start of the entry.

I’m not good at following directions.

But I ran across a rather promising media player called Songbird. It’s built on the Mozilla platform and has the capability to find media links on a web page and play them. As I type this sentence, I’m listening to the files I’ve posted here as a playlist.

To accomodate this capability in Songbird, I’m posting the "365 Days, 365 Files" entries in full on the front page. While I’ll still keep with my habit of putting links to files at the end of my entries, I won’t hide them either.

In addition to seeking out media links, Songbird allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and plays any files contained in the feed. It’s a function similar to one my friend Ryan pointed out in iTunes.

You can subscribe to the Musicwhore.org RSS feed like a podcast by going to Advanced » Subscribe to Podcast and entering the URL of the feed. Once subscribed, iTunes downloads the sound files to your machine. Ryan said he created a Musicwhore.org playlist on his iPod.

A strange idea for a New Year’s Resolution

I wrote only seven entries for the entire month of November.

I blame my lack of productivity on NaSoAlMo, but at the same time, I feel kind of daunted by the backlog of listening I’ve accrued. It’s the same kind of backlog that made me redesign this site a little more than a year ago to be less of a burden. Now that burden rears its head again.

New, new, new, new, new — it seems most music writing focuses on what’s new and what’s next. I’ve been trying to focus more on what I like (note how I don’t say what’s good) than on what’s new. But the "new" trap is an easy one in which to fall.

So I’m toying with a strange New Year’s resolution for this site: to spend an entire year writing about nothing but what’s already in my CD collection.

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The can what is filled with worms

I’ve been running an old version of Movable Type for a while now, and that’s because I’ve got a bunch of custom code from the old archive depending on it.

I’ve been lazy to upgrade, and the brouhaha over the revised licensing of version 3.0 made me wonder whether it was worth the effort. As a result, this site hasn’t really employed some of the basic requirements of a weblog — comments, specifically.

Well, I upgraded to Movable Type 3.33 back on Tuesday, and today, I’ve enabled the commenting system.

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Excuses and experiments

Yes, I know new content here on Musicwhore.org is sporadic — and in my opinion, quite half-assed — but I tend to spread myself thin. I keep hiding behind my bedroom music project as excuse, which is one of many really.

Eleven months ago, I promised to write every day in my online journal till the 10th anniversary of the site on Sept. 6, 2006. It’s just less than a month away now. I have to say, trying to come up with that much writing is a pain in the motherfucking ass. But there is one bright spot to all of it — I’m retiring that site come Sept. 6.

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Still distracted

In an effort to spur myself to post something here, I started a number of blank entries for reviews I want to write. I thought the reserved space for a future entry would fake me out into filling it up with text.

Nope.

First, my distraction was with the Great Music Library Rip of 2006. Now, I’m at work with Eponymous 4, my bedroom studio project. As long as I’m directing my energies there, I’m pretty much phoning in everything else.

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ALERT: Bug with YesAsia PayPal feature

It’s already happened to me twice, so perhaps I should let others know …

There’s a serious bug affecting how orders are placed at YesAsia.com when you pay through PayPal. In the past, paying through PayPal took you off site from YesAsia to send payment. After a payment is sent, PayPal brought you back to YesAsia, whereupon your order was placed.

For my last two orders, I would be taken off-site to PayPal to send a payment, but when I returned to YesAsia, I was brought back where I started — at the page to place the order. In short, my payment was sent, but the order was not placed.

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Distracted

Yes, I’ve been rather neglectful of posting here. I’ve been busy trying to rip my music library to MP3. I finally managed to get it all done — some 60GB and 10.6K files — so now I have time to write.

Problem is, all that ripping has been incredibly distracting.

I’ve been unearthing music I haven’t listened to in years, and it’s scattering my focus. There’s some new music I’d like to feature, but there some old gems I’d like to uncover as well. So an honest-to-goodness update may not be in the cards for the immediate future.

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