New toy: the LiveJournal™ Music Chart. My excuse was learning Python – you won’t need an excuse to enjoy the top twenty tracks, as “voted for” by those febrile LiveJournalists. It’s an illuminating selection. One of the main reasons I wrote it was to act as an early-warning system for bands and tracks liable to “blow up” without my noticing, and okay, LiveJournal is probably not totally comprised of trend leaders, but it’s at least as valid as the CDDB top ten (which is perhaps my favourite piece of covert statistical gathering), and a lot more specific.
From looking at recent charts, I should clearly take note of
Brand New’s
popularity. I’m also surprised to see how prevalent
The Cure
are, and how many songs there are called “I Miss You.” I’m
not as surprised to see the wide range of possible ways to spell
“Evanescence.” (I’m not doing anything clever with spelling yet, although
a combination of some fairly drastic normalisation and the
Google
spell checking service would take care of that.) It
would be good to integrate
magnet:
links
to
MP3s
too, although that’s probably not the kind of thing the
RIAA
would see the funny side of.
I’ve also added a link to
XML::Writer
to the site menu; it’s a Perl module that had a couple of bugs in it. I tried
to get them fixed and, in doing so, learned the true meaning of
CPAN
(and RT, and
Devel::Cover,
as well as the subtleties of Perl module versioning).
Also also, there are now archive listings, to ensure my old postings are strongly reachable through the web. Obviously any off-the-shelf blogging software would take care of this for me, but then where’s the fun in that?
)