Moving forward

Dear Dem Apples readers, I'm going to be very self indulgent and write a post about me.  Specifically, my graduating.  It has been a pleasure getting to blog here with various folks over the years, from the liveblogging craziness of our Mark Warner gala (too bad we lost that...) to the Dem Apples promo video(that one's for you, Audrey), from covering my home state of Massachusetts to my focus on voter rights, registration, and participation this past year, it has been great having a place to express my thoughts.  

Since I'm graduating this week, I feel it is best for me to no longer post here, except maybe in the comments every now and again, but I invite readers to come visit me on my new blog.  Just email me for the address at rwinikat <at> g mail Many thanks to you all because a blog is nothing without its readers (cough desperate plea for subscribers cough cough).

Forward! 

Music Blogging

I almost flipped my lid when I saw this on First Draft -- apparently, there's a website out there with a huge library of user-hosted music files, perfectly legal. It's called Radio Blog Club, and you can basically describe it as YouTube for mp3s. Much like YouTube, they give you code to embed an audio file anywhere, making it supereasy to blog with a soundtrack. For instance, here's Clapton:

Or, if you're not the classic rock type, try Girls Aloud (commercial British pop that, amazingly, is actually really good):

There are catches. Adding your own music to this thing is complicated and technically clunky (you have to upload it to your own webspace, put up their player, etc. -- and it uses a lot of finicky PHP and XML, which I learned the hard way after Harvard FAS hosting spit it all back in my face). The library is huge, but pretty random, and heavier on British and European acts than their stateside equivalents. And the website itself is weird and clearly translated from French.

Nevertheless. How AWESOME is it that you can legally and easily blog all this great music? I personally think that any and every blogpost would benefit greatly from a soundtrack (setting the mood, you know), and I know I'm not the only music-obsessive on this blog (cough*Garrett*cough) that likes to share new and interesting bands. We'll see if that kind of thing develops.

--Plus, you can customize the color scheme of the player, which is cool -- especially when you use it to obscure the name of the song. First person to identify this band gets a dollar (and no Googling the lyrics, that's cheating):

Dem Widgets