Blog Updates Day!

No song of the day today because I’ve been busy ready­ing some new pages for the blog, some new playlists for the end of sum­mer, and sort­ing through the list of ideas and aspi­ra­tions I had for this here blog.

I’ve been work­ing on increas­ing func­tion­al­ity and web pres­ence for the blog by con­nect­ing it to networkedblogs.com. This great resource auto­mat­i­cally updates my face­book page for the blog, my per­sonal face­book account’s wall and my twit­ter account in one fell swoop, mak­ing my work to get the blog out there a mil­lion times easier.

Also, I’m putting the word out to see if any­one is inter­ested in being a reg­u­lar (or, hell, irreg­u­lar is bet­ter than noth­ing) guest blog­ger all up in he’. Terms negotiable—you could have a once a month gig, or Tues­days could be your bag. Please con­tact me if you’re inter­ested, dad. I’d love to have you, since you’re my only reader and I trust your musi­cal sensibilities.

New pages added to the blog:

• Artists Fea­tured — a wor­dle visu­al­iza­tion of all of the artists I’ve ded­i­cated Song Of The Day posts to!
• Monthly Visu­als — More ocu­lar joy. These are col­lages of each month’s artist pho­tos, found via google image searches. Since 99.9% of the hits on my blog are peo­ple doing google image searches them­selves, I thought I’d pro­vide some more eye candy. Pick­ing out the pho­tos for the posts is def­i­nitely a high­light for me! So far, the 2009 visu­al­iza­tions are up, and 2010 are in the works—they will be posted next week!
• The Orig­i­nal Song Of The Day Tomb — Born in 1998, died in 2001, this will be the site of the orig­i­nal list of Songs of The Day I chose in high school when I was email­ing lyrics to my friends on a daily basis. This list is a work in seri­ous progress but I decided to at least pub­lish the page to let you know it’s coming!

Old pages updated:

• 2010 Playlist Archives has been deleted: Since the blog has been up and run­ning since Sep­tem­ber 2009, every playlist made in 2010 has a ded­i­cated blog entry and thus is eas­ily acces­si­ble under the tab labeled “Playlists”. No need for there to be a sep­a­rated ded­i­cated page for it!
• 2009 Playlist Archives — Now the 2009 Archives only house the lists cre­ated from Jan­u­ary 2009 through August 2009, since, again, the blog was started in Sep­tem­ber of that year, and it seemed redun­dant to have those Sep­tem­ber through Decem­ber playlists in both blog entries (search­able under the “playlists” tab) and in this archive.

Projects not yet pub­lished but now in progress:

• My pro­files on the fol­low­ing music web­sites (there will be live links to these pro­files in the left-hand links col­umn soon, I promise): Grooveshark, Imeem, LastFM, Pan­dora, setlist.fm, youtube.com
• Con­cert & The­atre List — shows I’ve seen, and reviews of them
• The Ulti­mate Cov­ers List – A Con­stant Work In Progress
• The Great Album Art Of The World Project
• The Great Records Of The World List
• Books I Love About Music
• The Great Bea­t­les Song List — a cat­e­gor­i­cally mas­sive chal­lenge to make sense of their huge cat­a­logue. This may evolve into some Top 10 lists, a rank­ing of their albums, a Top 100 Great­est Songs list, a great lyrics list, not sure how I will pay proper homage, but the wheels are now offi­cially churn­ing on this project.
• Great Paste Mag­a­zine Arti­cles For The Musi­cally Minded — Since no one I know gets Paste, and I’ve read some of the best arti­cles of my life in that mag­a­zine, I thought I’d scan some of my favorites from the ol’ joa­nee hang­ing file sys­tem for your read­ing pleasure.
• Bass Lines That Slay — An always evolv­ing con­cept project for how to prop­erly pay respect to incred­i­ble bass lines of all gen­res. Sort of Pan­dora Music Genome Project of my own.

List of new nomen­cla­tures for post cat­e­gories (and cor­re­spond­ing top-of-blog tabs):

• “All Songs” — Denotes that the blog entry is a true Song of The Day, i.e. a post about one par­tic­u­lar song. This dis­tin­guishes these types of entries from playlist entries.
• “30’s & Ear­lier”, “40’s”, “50’s”, “60’s”, “70’s”, “80’s”, “90’s”, and “00’s” — The decade cat­e­gories, sim­ple enough. Hop­ing to do some­thing more elab­o­rate and visual with my decade data at some spe­cific date, but that project is in early con­cept stages for now.
• “All Cov­ers” — Means the blog entry is a Song Of The Day that is notably a cover.
• “All Note­wor­thy Albums” - This is when I chose not to blog about a song, but rather an entire album. It doesn’t hap­pen a lot.
• “Fea­tured In Film Or T.V.” — Means I learned of the song through one of these two media (t.v. rep­re­sent­ing com­mer­cials and shows, of course). I always try to cite the source that intro­duced the song to me, to give the peo­ple who work hard on those sound­tracks some props for intro­duc­ing the world and I to much great music.
• “Hol­i­day” — I felt it was wor­thy of dis­tin­guish­ing those times when I felt the speci­fici­ties of the cal­en­dar date affected my Song Of The Day selections.
• “Musi­cals” — Doesn’t hap­pen a lot, but occa­sion­ally I dip into the holy waters of Broad­way for my songly inspi­ra­tion. I mostly do clas­sic broad­way, some­times even vin­tage (1930’s and earlier).
• “Oh Canada!” — A dying breed of entry on this blog. When I lived in Detroit, most of the new music I was dis­cov­er­ing was Cana­dian. I hope to be stream­ing 93.9 The River again soon so that I can get back to blog­ging about the Great White North.
• “Playlists” — The blog entries that don’t con­tain Songs Of The Day, but rather a playlist. Many of these are even designed to be played in their spe­cific given order. I take great pride in these playlists. This cat­e­gory includes the playlist I make at the end of every month of songs that hit me dur­ing the past 4 weeks.
• “Top 10 Lists” — A fun but chal­leng­ing exer­cise I occa­sion­ally endeavor on in some of my blog entries, par­tic­u­larly when I love the artist I’m dis­cussing so much that I have to men­tion more of their work. These are a great read, I promise!