In December, I set out to move my site from the previous static site generator, Jekyll, to a brand new one, Hugo. Perhaps inevitably, this job turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. Equally inevitably, I wildly overestimated my enthusiasm for hacking away at this over Christmas. As such, here we are at the start of February and it’s (just about) finished.
The site was previously put together using Jekyll. This is a ruby-based static site generator that takes a heap of markdown files, mashes them through a bunch of templates and generates some HTML.
The new static site generator, Hugo, does more or less the same, but is written in Go. So why change? Well… mostly for the fun of doing so, if I’m honest. There’s a bunch of advantages (I can write Go, I can’t write Ruby; it’s slightly faster; it’s got a large current dev community behind it) but none are so big as to really merit this change.
I’ve also used this change to move to running this site with Infrastructure-as-code at the heart of the setup. It’s hosted in AWS Amplify, which is astonishingly easy to setup, and managed by Pulumi. There are a few benefits here:
The only necessary code or config that isn’t in the repo now is the DNS settings. These are managed in Cloudflare using Terraform/Pulumi. They’re only separate because they live alongside a bunch of other, unrelated DNS stuff.
Over at /chopping-mall is something I’m very pleased to have restored: my first blog. I wrote on Chopping Mall intermittently for several years ~2010. It’s always bothered me that it was held in Blogspot / Blogger with no easy way to export it. But no more! I found some XML export and Hugo import tools and now have all the old posts in Markdown, in the repo. There are some broken links and images to sort through, but the vast majority is there.
I’ve split out /walks into its own dedicated site section. Still with maps. Still with files you can download. I’m edging slowly away from Geojson file (lovely open format, yay! Not exported by OS Maps app, boo!) to GPX files.
My hope is that my renewed enthusiasm for this blog will get me using it to build up interesting things bit-by-bit. I’m intending to do booklists, filmlists and so on, and generally use it a bit more. Let’s see…
Having decided that it’s the right time to rebuild my music library (see the previous post), I’m now starting to scratch my head over how to do it.
There are a few areas I clearly need to get my head around and consider the option available to me. These include:
Some of these are easier to answer than others.
I’m trying not to overcomplicate this, but I think there are quite a lot of exciting opportunities here. I want to be able to:
I’d like to be able to build and amend ad-hoc collections with ease (“music for driving”, “cooking music”, “ambient-ish-stuff-to-listen-to-while-reading”).
I’d like to be able to visualise all of the above. I love a graph.
A lesser goal - perhaps more of a nice-to-have - would be to have linking between artists, records, labels, genres. Something where you can get to similar things and explore your collection. I have no idea how feasible this is, and it’s by no means essential.
I want full access to my data. I’m taking it for granted that whatever software I end up using is going to add some sort of data layer on top of file metadata tags - otherwise any query would have to read the whole library! This data must be easily accessible. I don’t mind if its a simple database written to disk or a JSON API that I can query, I just need to be able to get hold of the data independently of the library software.
The simpler, the better.
I think I’m confident in my choices here. I’m sticking with Beets.
Beets has served me well for many, many years. It’s a solid bit of open source software built by music nerds for music nerds. It slurps in new files, tags them according to rules and organises them on disk. It’s backed by a Sqlite database file, which makes querying the data yourself really easy (apart from Sqlite being a pig about concurrent access…).
I think I need to get the basic technical elements set up first. Something along the lines of:
After that, I think the fun really starts. It doesn’t actually matter how I approach it, I just need to keep adding to the library. I plan to do weeks where I explore a specific genre, the back catalog of a specific artist, revisit records I’ve not listened to in a while, explore something brand new. It’s all welcome.
Key decisions that need making:
Other things to explore:
It’s coming up to the end of the year, a time for making plans, resolutions, projects and so on and so forth. How many of them will survive contact with 2025? Who knows. But here’s the tentative start of a new project: I’m going to rebuild my music library. And I’m going to document the process on here.
The project? Well… I have librarian blood. It goes deep into who I am. Stuff’s got to be organised! And it really, really isn’t. I’ll get into the detail of the problem further down this post but it’s got to the point where it makes me twitch. Something must be done!
There are also loads of sensible, pragmatic reasons. Not least:
I was lucky enough to be really getting into music right at the tipping point from physical to digital media. All my first albums were on CD but we were busy ripping them to MP3 to write to a new disk, title scrawled on in marker. We were grabbing the early Arctic Monkeys demos from MySpace. I was posting on music forums, with mailing lists where we forwarded whole albums to each other (RIP AudioJunkies - much missed). I was testing how well iTunes’s windows app worked on a sprawling library (not well, it turns out, prompting a swap to FooBar2000).
Music was something to be explored and studied, and in doing so acquired. Before we had (semi-)reliable digital libraries, you had no idea if you’d ever hear that track again if it didn’t get added to your library. Right-click. Save-as.
So the library grew and grew.
It’s really quite bad. My music library (heap?) appears to be 1TB in size, with roughly 76,000 files in it. This breaks down as 46k MP3s and 26k FLACs. That’s a lot of stuff. And I suspect that the vast majority of it isn’t stuff that I actually really want.
Start over. Sort of.
The plan from here is to build a new library. I’m going to curate it carefully from the ground-up, adding artists I like, labels I like, filling gaps where I find then. It’s going to be immaculately tagged and indexed, making exploring it a pleasure, not a chore.
It’s going to lossless (predominantly? totally?). It’s going to be organised. It’s going to be beautiful.
Quite how I do this will need some thinking about and another blog post.
2024 has started and there are lots of good films to watch! Here’s a bunch we’ve seen at the cinema this year…
For everything else that 2023 may have been, or not been, there’s been a lot of excellent music. Here we are at the end of the year. Grab your headphones, hide from the world outside. Here are my favourite records of the year.
S&S produces a lot of music, and a lot of it has never really connected with me. But this one does. By turns full of good beats, funny stories and weird noises. Excellent stuff.
I don’t love this quite as much as their first, but its still great. Spiky, post-punk loveliness.
I was surprised by how much this stuck in my head. It’s the soundtrack to a film about the Greenham Common protests and isn’t subtle at all, but I keep finding myself singing little bits of it.
This is my kind of folk music. Macabre, dark stories, told over shuddering bass and weird noises. Fabulous.
Short and sweet, walls of fuzzy guitar noise.
Cracking post-punk tunes with some wickedly funny lines. As you’d expect from a band called Meatraffle.
Gorgeous NY reggae. Their first album is equally good. Get to know.
It’s the Mountain Goats. It’s a polished one, with horns and all. I love it.
This is an absolute gem. Sits alongside Bicep’s Atlas in my mind, and that’s high praise.
Understated electronica. This one pulses and bubbles and fizzes. For fans of Pye Corner Audio, Demdike Stare and the like. I love this sort of thing.
Mungo’s are a reliable source of bangers, but this one is wall to wall greatness. Absolute stomping tunes.
OK, this won’t be for everyone. It’s deeply weird and not an easy listen but its fascinating and very memorable. I love it. Very hard to describe. Give ‘All of my friends are going to hell’ a listen.
Sleeper hit for me. It’s very understated. All gentles tunes with a little folksy storytelling. Worth giving some time to. I love all this hauntology business.
Leeds Leeds Leeds. Bringer of Brine was my most listened track of the year, and ‘I was the first Tetrapod’ can’t have been far behind. Stomping techno-tinged wonky pop tunes.
I know nothing about this. Don’t know anything about the artist. Can’t remember how I found it. But it’s great.
Everything these folk make is excellent and this one goes hard. Psych-folk? Alt-fusion? Chant-rock? The internet has no idea how to classify them. It doesn’t matter. This is ace.