I just gave the web service Technorati a try. One of the things that appealed to me was the feature whereby you give it a subject (eg. "Glastonbury Festival", "iPod" etc) and it provides you with a list of blog posts regarding the subject. I thought if it was good enough, I could take an RSS feed of each 'Watchlist' and include it in my Google Reader feeds.
So I tried this, but sadly almost all of the posts suggested are spam. Shame as its a good idea.
One good thing about Technorati though is the homepage. Using a nifty ajax interface, it provides a stream of new blog posts, sort of in real-time. It's something Delicious would benefit from. A few posts in I found a good YouTube video which was about a help desk setup to support the Death Star, manned by down-to-earth Storm Troopers. It crashed my browser though :-(
The strange thing is, since signing up for the service I can't seem to find that real-time feed! Typical.
Friday, November 30, 2007
White Label
I got my very first white-label 7" through the post today. I can't be sure whether the artist is called I Blame Coco or whether that's the name of the song. Either way, its a very good track. It's a female singer with a sparse yet funky and catchy melody/backing to it.
I wasn't really sure what to expect with a white-label in terms of packing etc. I've heard Peel refer to them many times, and from what I gather its released as a white-label because its the least expensive way of releasing a single.
I've just flicked on to the B-Side now. Very funky and dub like. I'm starting to wonder if its just an instrumental version of the A side. Either way, I like it. Strange as I never could see the point of those either.
Anyway, the packaging hasn't disappointed. The sleeve itself is white. And the actual record label itself is, as you'd guess, white, with "I Blame Coco" scruffily hand written on it in parker pen! Great!
I got six 7" singles in total through the post today (all random purchases (Bar Lorraine)). So far (3 records in) nothing I've listened to can stand up against "look look (dancing boys)" (see my post "The John Peel Experience"), but then I think that was a one off. Three songs I should hate but truly love. That's not to say the singles haven't been good.
At the time of writing this (sentence) I have Chinese Burn on and that is sounding really good. Kind of like early Beatles but with a twist. I've just flicked to the B-Side and strangely enough its the second song of the three records to sound like the Hollies.. is there a bit of a Hollies revival going on in the underground scene?!
As mentioned "I Blame Coco" was also very good. Both of those records I'd happily go out of my way to put on again (as is the case with records.. none of this drag-n-drop onto Winamp convenience).
The first single I played (High Priests) wasn't as good, which is a shame as that's the one I double ordered by mistake!
Still to get a play are Jazz Monkey, Dead Kids and Lorraine.
Lorraine are a band I saw support The Feeling in Taunton. I think I was the only person in the venue that "didn't mind em", rather than hate them. From memory they are like The Pet Shop Boys, so I'm baffled as to why I didn't dislike them.
I wasn't really sure what to expect with a white-label in terms of packing etc. I've heard Peel refer to them many times, and from what I gather its released as a white-label because its the least expensive way of releasing a single.
I've just flicked on to the B-Side now. Very funky and dub like. I'm starting to wonder if its just an instrumental version of the A side. Either way, I like it. Strange as I never could see the point of those either.
Anyway, the packaging hasn't disappointed. The sleeve itself is white. And the actual record label itself is, as you'd guess, white, with "I Blame Coco" scruffily hand written on it in parker pen! Great!
I got six 7" singles in total through the post today (all random purchases (Bar Lorraine)). So far (3 records in) nothing I've listened to can stand up against "look look (dancing boys)" (see my post "The John Peel Experience"), but then I think that was a one off. Three songs I should hate but truly love. That's not to say the singles haven't been good.
At the time of writing this (sentence) I have Chinese Burn on and that is sounding really good. Kind of like early Beatles but with a twist. I've just flicked to the B-Side and strangely enough its the second song of the three records to sound like the Hollies.. is there a bit of a Hollies revival going on in the underground scene?!
As mentioned "I Blame Coco" was also very good. Both of those records I'd happily go out of my way to put on again (as is the case with records.. none of this drag-n-drop onto Winamp convenience).
The first single I played (High Priests) wasn't as good, which is a shame as that's the one I double ordered by mistake!
Still to get a play are Jazz Monkey, Dead Kids and Lorraine.
Lorraine are a band I saw support The Feeling in Taunton. I think I was the only person in the venue that "didn't mind em", rather than hate them. From memory they are like The Pet Shop Boys, so I'm baffled as to why I didn't dislike them.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
New(ish) Look Site
For those of you (well, for the person) that reads my Blogger blog (if it's called Greg's Blog at the top, that's the one) you might like to know that the blog is now located at a new home. Its got exactly the same blog posts (as its based on an RSS feed from Blogger (saves me rewriting what the guys at Blogger have written)) but its on a site I designed myself alongside a list of all the music I own and how I rate that music. What's more, its running on my (incredibly geekish thing to do) home Linux server.
The music section is probably the first bit of code on the web that I've created since the days of Easyhosts, and I'm really pleased with it. For those who are interested in HTML, PHP, the Zend Framework, Javascript, XML and JSON, I might write up how I went about creating the site. That sounds incredibly dull to most people, but to tell you the truth is the sort of thing I'd quite enjoy reading if some of my friends wrote such a thing.
Just to get one thing straight, the music section is populated by a script that takes the data from my iTunes. I'm not sad enough to manually enter the details myself, but just sad enough to write a script that does it for me..
The new site: www.greggannicott.co.uk
The music section is probably the first bit of code on the web that I've created since the days of Easyhosts, and I'm really pleased with it. For those who are interested in HTML, PHP, the Zend Framework, Javascript, XML and JSON, I might write up how I went about creating the site. That sounds incredibly dull to most people, but to tell you the truth is the sort of thing I'd quite enjoy reading if some of my friends wrote such a thing.
Just to get one thing straight, the music section is populated by a script that takes the data from my iTunes. I'm not sad enough to manually enter the details myself, but just sad enough to write a script that does it for me..
The new site: www.greggannicott.co.uk
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