December 6, 2008

I had the idea for Sipsnblips.com back in 2007. At the time I was a little frustrated with Knowingart.com, finding abstract art I like takes a lot of searching. Then contacting, negotiating with artists takes time. Do I have permission to use an image? Then I look at the art over a span of days until I think I have good interview questions. Then comes more editing, HTML/CSS work, etc.

The idea for Sipsnblips.com was to change the pace. I’d write about music as I was listening. I wouldn’t contact the musician. I wouldn’t link to the music. My idea was to code software to automate publishing what I was listening to on Last.fm, because I’d need to complete each post very quickly before the next song. With one click my blog would download the song/album/artist. That data, along with my thoughts about the song, would save to a database I could slice and dice. Then you could surf my thoughts by album, artist.

Eventually Last.fm implemented this. Now they have a song-by-song “shout” board. They came up with a solution to the “shortness of time” problem I just mentioned. If you’re not finished with your “shout” on a song, it won’t refresh the page until you’re finished writing. But the music keeps playing. When you submit your “shout” it will refresh the page with new shouts from the next song, the song you’re already listening to. That’s fine, but I want to do that on my own domain, I don’t work for free. And what if I want to go back and make changes? On my own domains I have more control.

Then I found Twitter. Could I combine my Last.fm listening with my tweets, pipe them together, sorted by date, chronologically? That worked for a while. At one point I had Yahoo Pipes sorting it. The problem is, last I checked, Last.fm doesn’t update listening feeds often enough, too much delay. Maybe the Last.fm API is faster.

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