LaBarca.org

More site updates - I added a LastFM weekly top artists list for my profile to the sidebar. It looks like this:

I’ve been tracking my music habits for about a year now using the service, and it’s a bit odd to look at the stats. LastFM tracks what songs you play using plugins for players like Winamp and iTunes. I have both plugins installed, but I rarely use iTunes to play music - just to organize it. Most of my music listening happens in Winamp with music that I recently acquire or rip - while it is still unorganized and possibly incorrectly tagged. I usually play the hell out of an album if I like it, then tag it correctly and file it away in my iTunes library - rarely to be played with any frequency again.

The main inaccuracy is that I use Winamp to search through tracks for use in creating Système-D podcasts, and then reviewing podcast release candidates. I also listen to Shoutcast streams frequently, which are not recorded. So that skews the stats a bit too. But I think the weekly top artists list that I included is a good reflection of what’s been hitting my ears recently.

The primary reason for including this thing is to keep myself sharp. If I catch it looking completely lame, I know I have to go out and discover new music - or awesome older music.

I’m in the process of moving the entire photo album to a database-driven gallery, which will replace the static pages I’ve been using for years. It’s taking a while, since there are 5.24 gigs of pictures to move over, and some cleanup to do as well. But it should be worth it after I’m done. There’ll be lots of new features like RSS, comments, a cool interface, and best of all - easy uploading for me.

After the gallery is switched over, I have to go through all my old posts here and fix broken links, so that should be good fun too. Once everything is done, I’ll put an announcement here - signaling that it’s safe to start letting me know about broken things.

Update (Sat Dec 9): I’m doing this now.  Things will be broken for a while today.