Updated Articles: Misc. Recommendations | Favorite Software | Audio Equipment
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I updated my Misc. Recommendations post with some new things and made a few minor website updates.
Made quite a few bug fixes and little enhancements over the last week.
A Better Simple Streaming Music Sharing Page
When I debuted the “share music page” in 2019, it was really just something I wanted for myself. I wanted a better way to be able to share music in my newsletter so that people could easily find the albums on their preferred streaming platform. But over the past few years I’ve heard from so many people that have used the page to share music with their friends and family as well. I see thousands of songs and albums in the database. To see a small personal project grow to be used by others is the biggest compliment.
As I wrote about last week, I’ve been working on improving my personal blog as a way to keep myself busy and away from doomscrolling. It’s been a fun nightly project to add some new features and start posting more photo and micro blogs when inspiration strikes. The first time I posted an update about something I was listening to I just knew I needed to find a way to combine my sharing project and my blog.
So I did.
Read More “A Better Simple Streaming Music Sharing Page”I added photo blogs and micro blogs to author pages (along with a few other aesthetic tweaks).
Author RSS Feeds Fixed
2024’s Version of the Chorus Update
Last year, I wrote about the annual state of Chorus in August. The state of the website was, more or less, that costs had increased, ad revenue had decreased, and supporter revenue had more or less stayed the same.
This year, I’m only a couple of months behind my already haphazard schedule of checking in on everything. Packing up a home and moving will toss everything into disarray like that.
The story of the past year is similar, with a few new bright spots.
The website’s costs have remained flat. I forecast that within the next twelve months, I’ll need to upgrade the forum server’s hard drive space again (we’re a little over half full, mostly from image attachments).
Ad revenue continues to be predictable and predictably less than the year before.
Supporter revenue continues to be strong and growing, which is why I can run this website and community.
Read More “2024’s Version of the Chorus Update”Rank It All! Or Did I Just Create a Monster?
If there’s one thing we like to do around here, it’s rank things.
From our End of the Year lists to the countless albums/sports/food rankings in the forums, it’s just a tradition at this point. When the conversation dies down, break out a ranking.
The other night, I was lying in bed thinking about the “bias sorter” going around Tumblr in 2018. It originated, I believe, as a way for people to rank their favorite K-pop bands. I’d been using it for the past few years to start my end of the year album rankings. It’s an excellent way to review a list and decide what you like more: A or B. But the problem is that it’s a pain to use. You need to enter each item individually, click enter after each one, and then go through the ranking process. And after you’re done, there’s no good way to do it again without manually re-entering all those items. I started wondering if I could put something together that would let me input any size list of things I wanted, and then it could present them to me one at a time to pick from and give me a final ranking.
Read More “Rank It All! Or Did I Just Create a Monster?”The (Not So) Annual State of Chorus.fm
I have a reoccurring reminder to reflect on the state of Chorus at least once a year. The idea is to pull all the numbers together, get an idea of how things are going, and make plans for the future of the website. I realized today that I hadn’t done this since 2021.
So, it was a morning of looking at spreadsheets. And I see a few obvious trends. The first is that the cost of running the website has increased. The most significant cost increase comes from our hosting provider unilaterally hiking prices 20% in April after being bought by another company. Cool. Second, the online advertising industry (already tenuous at best) has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. I charted the last two years, and we’re continuing to trend downward.
Read More “The (Not So) Annual State of Chorus.fm”An Update on the Rest of 2020
As I wrote about in October, this was a very weird year to be running an independent, online, business. I just wanted to take a few moments to be upfront about a couple of changes that I’m going to be making for the rest of this year. In the online ad world, the last part of the year is usually one of the best for online advertising. It tracks along with the holidays and consumer spending and advertisers wanting to convince shoppers to buy their gadgets and gizmos. Now, digital advertising has been a mess for virtually everyone this year, but there’s a small hope we can make up some of that lost revenue with a terrific final quarter. So, I’m going to let the company that handles all of our display ads run a few different advertisements on the website for the next month.
Honestly? They’re probably going to be annoying as hell. They’ve promised to keep everything frequency capped so that users only see one of the annoying ads one time per session, but there’s no nice way to spin the fact that these kinds of advertisements suck for the user experience. I know it, you know it, but it’s me throwing everything at the wall as we end the year in an attempt to salvage what, in many ways, has been a lost year. I want to be forthright about it, so everyone knows what is coming. And, to let you know you can remove all ads on the website by becoming a member. (These ads will only run for a few months, and we have a monthly option for just $3 a month. Remove all ads, get dark mode, live the good life.)
I don’t know what 2021 will hold, but I plan to continue to keep everyone updated as we journey into this uncharted territory together. I hope everyone is staying safe and doing well. The contributors and I have begun preparing for our end of the year feature, which we hope to run, like always, in early January.
Blast From the Past: Old AbsolutePunk.net Best of Lists
When I re-designed the new website and put together the new “End of the Year” feature page, I added a bunch of old lists from the AbsolutePunk days as well. They’re a lot of fun to read back through and remember the albums, remember the arguments, and see which ones have held up and which ones are hilariously all over the place.
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2005
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2006
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2007
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2008
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2009
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2010
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2011
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2012
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2013
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2014
- AbsolutePunk.net’s Top Albums of 2015
Big news: I’ve been able to recreate all of the lists, in the correct order. With a special shoutout to sosplatano in the forums for helping me figure out the holes in 2012.
UPDATE #2 • May 28, 2020In an incredible turn of events, a reader had saved all of my personal best of lists and has sent them to me. Those have now also been added back into the database.
Introducing Chorus 3.0
I started designing the new version of Chorus.fm before the COVID-19 shit hit the fan. My initial sketches were in the middle of last year, and I began playing around with things in Sketch not long after that. My first commit, for the version I’m calling 3.0 of the website, was on February 19th, 2020. However, it was this last month or so of quarantine where the vast majority of the work got done. With not a whole lot else to do beside buckle down and attempt to turn anxiety about the world into productivity, I put together the new website you’re looking at now.
April of this year was the fourth anniversary of this website, and I’ve been itching to take another run at the design and feel of the website for a while. When I first launched the site, it was my first real foray into the world of WordPress, and it was done on a very tight timeline as I knew I needed to make the transition from AbsolutePunk.net by a specific date. I’ve always been happy with what I put together, but I also knew it was never quite right. This new version of the site is virtually everything I’ve always wanted my website to be and was written from the ground up to fulfill my vision of what a music website or blog should be. My design goals were to keep a similar aesthetic to the current website so that things felt familiar while also focusing on new features, simplicity of use, and an obsession with speed and a great mobile experience. I’m proud of what I came up with, and I’d like to highlight a few of the changes.
The Fourth Anniversary of Chorus.fm
Today marks the official fourth anniversary of launching this website.
Another year, and wow, are we in the middle of some weird shit right now. I just wanted to take a brief moment to thank everyone for visiting this website every single day and, specifically, to everyone that helps support us. With all the uncertainty in the world right now, turning to the one constant I’ve always had, working on this website and listening to good music, has been comforting. I’m currently in the middle of a redesign of the entire homepage, and I hope to have that completed within the next few months. I’ve tried to turn all of this “at home time” into something productive, and I’m excited to share the results with everyone in the near future. I’ve been documenting some of the process in my weekly newsletter.
I hope everyone is staying safe out there.
Some of the stats from the past year:
- 3,467 new articles posted on the main site. (16,553 total)
- 530,082 words were published last year. (2,405,320 total)
- 948,794 new forum posts were made. (3,648,860 total)
Updated Recommendations
Once a year I update a bunch of my recommendation posts around the website to see if new things need to be added to them, this year I’ve made updates to:
- Favorite Headphones
- Misc. Recommendations
- Favorite Software
- Favorite Albums
- Favorite Movies
- Favorite TV Shows
Also, I tossed out an ask on Twitter for recommendations of blogs or websites (about any topic) that people recommend reading. I like to ask this every once in a while to refresh what I have in my feeds, so if you have any recommendations of websites I should be checking out and reading, please let me know.
A Simple Streaming Music Sharing Page for Chorus
The music streaming service revolution has been one of the biggest, and most exciting, developments to the music and technology world in my lifetime. We went from driving to a store to buy music, often without ever hearing it beforehand, to having countless hours of music in our pockets with virtually no limits to what we could discover and listen to with the mere press of a button.
As someone that runs a music website, and now a weekly newsletter, that often includes recommendations about new music, I’ve long struggled with just how to share those recommendations with the most people. On this website, I often link to the YouTube video in the post itself for instant listening and then will link to Apple Music and Spotify when appropriate (or if the song isn’t on YouTube yet) since those are the two biggest streaming platforms. I like those short URLS that a lot of labels and PR people are using these days that aggregate all of the streaming platforms into one place for easy sharing; however, what I really wanted was something that I had a little more control over. What if I use a service like this and then it goes under, and all my links die? All of a sudden hours of meticulously linking music recommendations on this website or my newsletter could end up having dead links. So, after coming across the excellent Song.Link service and their API, I decided I would be best served in creating something for myself. That way I could easily create a place to share a song or album, and I wouldn’t have to worry about the URL going away in a few years or it not being updated as streaming services come and go.
The end result is a page that includes links to all the big streaming services, as well as a YouTube video for quick streaming if it exists, and links to purchase the music as well. For example:
- Blink-182 – “Happy Days”
- Mannequin Pussy – “Patience”
- MxPx – “Doing Time”
- Paramore – After Laughter
- Sigrid – Sucker Punch
Read More “A Simple Streaming Music Sharing Page for Chorus”