Internet

My favourite FREE music

Victoria — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:00:10 -0400

Here's a list of my favourite FREE music. Yes, fellow cheapo-music-lovers, they're free for download. How wonderful, the internet is a wonderful place. And these are all legal too, I wouldn't want to rip these poor indie musicians off. I think this giving way free music works really well for them. I have often ended up buying the entire album anyway.

These tracks on the list are mostly from podcasts. The ones from IndieFeed have some narration in them, so they're not just the music tracks, but the others are just purely free music, just as if ripped from the albums.

I subscribe to the IndieFeed Podcast channels (Indie Pop, Electronica, Alternative / Modern Rock), and also the KEXP Song of The Day podcast. The list below are mostly songs I've discovered through the podcasts.

The Daytrotter ones are really cool too, they're not podcasts, but from a website. It's a really interesting idea, I highly recommend anyone to go explore the site. Here's how they describe what they do:

[the artists] ...as they’re traveling through America’s heartland – take two hours out of their travels between shows to stop in for a Daytrotter Session at Futureappletree Studio One in downtown Rock Island, Ill. The name of the city is not ironic. They use borrowed instruments, play with their touring mates, utilize a often unkempt toilet, eat some food and then cram back into their vans for the last half of the drive.

And then there are the ones that nice indie bands put up for free on their websites (such as Cloud Cult.. Oh I love them).

There you go:

Happy silly

Sexy cool

Sappy wrenching

Chilly spacy

Whatever. I just love them... (mostly rock/altern)

PS: The ones with the heart icons are especially loved by me.

Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin)

Victoria — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. You can specify the text for the updates, and also have the option to turn the auto update on/off for the different post actions in the admin panel. Eg, when you edit a post, your Twitter gets updated with: Fiddling with my blog post: Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin) ( http://blog.victoriac.net/?... ) Instructions

Download and unzip the Twitter Updater folder
Upload and copy the twitter updater folder to your WordPress plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins/)
Now you have to tell WordPress to activate the new plugin. You do this by going to your admin panel > Plugins. And click on 'Activate' next to 'Twitter Updated'. If you don't see Twitter Updater there, you may have copied the Twitter Updater folder to the wrong directory.
Go to your WordPress admin panel, select 'Manage' at the top menu, then select 'Twitter Updater'.
Enter your preference and your Twitter account details.
Test by creating a new post!

Let me know if you find any bugs with it! It's my first WordPress plugin, so it may not be perfect. Alternative versions by other contributors

Kevin De Mulder: TwitterComments - updates Twitter when a comment is posted on your blog.
Jonathan Dingman: Twitter updater with support for tinyurl.
Ceritium: Twitter updater that uses short url with your domain name.
James Cridland: Bugfix for Twitter updater if it doesn't work for you.

(Let me know if you want me to add your link here.)

Twitter your time

Victoria — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I have recently created an account at twitter.com, invited by Natalie. It is really interesting to see how such a simple application can affect you and your friends. This is a good example of how a simple idea can be a great idea. Basically it is a social networking web application that lets you report what you are doing at any point in time so your friends or anyone can see it. Such as in that box at this blog's sidebar (provided by twitter.com, it fetches the data I have entered in twitter.com), you can see what I did 10mins ago, etc. There are 2 obvious ways to update your twitters, one is before you start doing something, and another is after you've finished doing something. I prefer the first, since it does give people a more updated report of what you are doing, naturally. But when I use this approach, it becomes obvious how much I procrastinate, or how easily I get distracted, as after I had updated that I was going to do X, I can see on my twitters that I had said I was going to do X 15mins ago, and yet I'm still not doing X yet! Or sometimes, I don't even end up doing what I said I was going to do. So that's why I always feel like I never have enough time to do what I want to do! Because I waste so much time getting distracted before starting anything. Try it, you might find your time gremlins too. Hrmm.. would be interesting to make some timeline based applications with the Twitter API. Lets see how much time will elapse after this thought when I finally do make something. PS: I've just finished writing a wordpress plugin for updating Twitter when I edit / create / publish a post. Will post it up for sharing after I tidy it up!