yelyah - “sidetracked 20111024” electronic
The 1 mp3/day thing on Tumblr always seems to come back to bite me.
What’s more common is that I miss the midnight deadline and then end up having to do a manual upload to s3 in order to “catch up”.
But then there are times like these where I have more than one track in a day to upload and so I’ve created a bunch of extra work for myself. Because frankly I’ve spoiled myself here. I copy an mp3 locally to a specific folder, make this blog post locally, and then a ruby script takes care of uploading it to tumblr and formatting the post.
But anytime that I miss the deadline or have more than 1 mp3 a day to upload, I have to go through (what feels like) this huge manual process of uploading the files to amazon s3 and making the tumblr post by hand.
Plus, tumblr is not really all that appropriate as a place to showcase music since reverse chronological is how all of the posts are displayed (doesn’t work well when you wrote your best music ages ago).
And then there’s the spam. Perhaps I’m spoiled here because tumblr was so pristine for so long but it’s become more and more of a problem.
The “X notes” thing on tumblr posts is now basically worthless since it never updates the total once the spammers have been blocked. Makes it basically impossible to tell if a human actually found something valuable or not.
And sadly the spam can be quite a depressing reminder that I’m unlikely to reach that number of likes through actual, real people.
So to tie this all up or something, some days it feels like tumblr isn’t worth the hassle. Things that used to be big pulls for me personally, like free custom domain hosting and free space for mp3s, are all stuff that I’ve since figured out how to do on the cheap (like with amazon s3, I can pull this off for literally pennies a month).
And plus, yelyah.com seriously needs to be updated. It’s basically running off the same raw files as this tumblr blog, but it hasn’t seen an update since March. Why? Well, basically, I figured out a way to use tumblr’s free mp3 hosting on my external site. But it means that I have to go through the HTML source of every post and find the link to the mp3 file that tumblr uses. Here’s an example:
http://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/400065042/tumblr_ky4nijWMIe1qzo4ep
Point here is it’s not named in a predictable way like “half past midnight.mp3”. Granted, I could write a script to go through and grab all of these links and then update my metadata, but that would require work and given all of the problems I have with tumblr’s 1 mp3/day limit, just deciding to switch everything over to amazon s3 starts looking like the preferable option.
Will I ever actually get around to doing any of this though? Given my track record, probably not.
Or probably tomorrow.
It could go either way really.
