Musicwhore.org Great. Another music blog. (2005-2013)

I don’t know if freshening up the figurative paint is going to spur me to write much more, but at least I got some practice with using CSS frameworks.

All that to say, I’ve given Musicwhore.org a new look. I’m using the Blueprint CSS framework as a basis for the design. The last time I went with a fixed width layout was 2003. Fluid designs, when done right, can accommodate more content, which is why I switched to them back then.

Well, all my sites are starting to look a bit dated, and now that I using more frameworks in my development — CodeIgniter for the server side, jQuery for the client side — I figured I may as well extend that usage to the design.

I think this design is the first time I’ve used a white background on anything since the late ’90s. White backgrounds, while professional as all get out, hurt my eyes. I’ve always opted for light-on-dark. Still do, but with this design I get a bit of both.

There are a few victims in this relaunch. Namely, the widgets — the Last.fm and Blip.fm widgets were becoming eyesore to me. The only widget that remains is my Bandcamp widget for Eponymous 4.

I’m keeping the previous design for the Musicwhore.org archive because it works better with that content. I still have to update the favicon.ico to reflect the new colors.

The design has also been applied to the neglected sister sites, Filmwhore.org and TVWhore.org.

One of the more enduring in-jokes at Metafilter is HI I’M ON METAFILTER AND I CAN OVERTHINK A PLATE OF BEANS. It essentially means over-analyzing something fairly trivial, something that doesn’t happen on this site. Oh, no sir.

But I may be overthinking how much I write — or lately, how much I don’t write — for the site. I’ve got tons of stuff playing on the media player, and they’re all organized by all sorts of priorities, but do I actually sit down and get through all that work? No, not really.

In 2005, I revamped this site from a fairly interactive music zine to a simple weblog. Now it feels I need to rethink my content priorities again.

I can’t seem to shake this sense of obligation to write about every single thing I’m listening to, which is not helped by the fact I can have tons of stuff on the media player at any time. And this blog is not the only outlet of expression I have.

So I think I’m just going to continue to post once in a while when something pops up — some release news — but for now, I need to take some more time to figure out about what I want to write and how I’m going to write it.

I don’t have much sidebar real estate to devote to my blogroll, and in reality, a lot of the blogs to which I’m subscribed in Bloglines don’t update very often.

Of the ones I read, a fraction of them has a content that makes its way here to Musicwhore.org. (Oh, who am I kidding? This site is essentially Bounce.com localized into English.)

After all this time, though, I ought to acknowledge some of the other sites I read when I’m not updating this one:

• Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise I actually like Alex Ross more as a print writer than as a blogger. I pretty much follow it to keep up with what he writers for the New Yorker.

• Amped Out In my quest to find music by gay artists that don’t suck — and that’s a tall order, in my book — I follow this music blog published by PlanetOut. Most of the time, it dishes on gay-marketed music than actual music by gay artists.

• ArtsJournal ArtsJournal is an arts-focused aggregator, and it used to have a separate feed for its music coverage. I think I prefer reading about all the arts now.

• aworks I can more than guarantee that whatever Robert Gable is listening to is something you are probably not.

• Bounce.com This site would not still be running if it weren’t for Bounce.com

• Keikaku.net I’d call this site the Pitchfork of Japanese indie rock, but the writing on Keikaku isn’t insufferable. I actually lurk on the forums more than anything else.

• purple Sky I actually contributed something to the purple Sky print magazine a while back — just a top 10 list. I found the site in my referral log one morning, and I’m glad to see they’ve moved the content online. Then again, a print publication is kind of a crazy proposition in this media climate.

• The Standing Room Actual blog posts on the Standing Room have become few and far between, but the linklog has some really great finds.