Welcome

This is the newly rebuilt Five Random Songs: chock full of posts, each featuring five random songs from my collection of music. Along with some other junk. Everything is tagged by artist. Poke around some, it’s been here since 2017. Starting in 2026, I shifted to twice-weekly posts with a little longer format. If you want to keep up, you can use RSS, sign up for email, or follow me on Bluesky.

Five Songs, 5/2/2026

Well, that was fun. The RSS was goofed up (it wasn’t doing full text), which I fixed by updating the RSS template on the site. The email subscription was also goofed up, but that was the fault of the RSS feed being borked, because the email template is supposed pull the stuff from the “content” section of each post, and the RSS template lacked that section. I’ll only find out if those fixes worked after this publishes. Well, the RSS feed does work, I checked that. But the email, we’ll just have to find out.

[Read More]

Five Songs, 4/29/2026

Welcome to the new Five Songs! The plan is for me to post a weekly thing rather than the previous daily-ish ones. We’ll see how the format is going to develop, but it will for sure include the titular five random songs. As for the rest, feel free to let me know what’s reading well and what isn’t. Anyway, I’m going to try and send this thing on Wednesdays.

A note about playlists, first. When I started Five Songs, more than nine years ago (geez!), I used YouTube to host playlists. It was the best of the various bad choices that were out there. It was publicly accessible without an account, lots of stuff was already uploaded to the site so I could just add the existing songs, I could upload (unlisted!) songs that were missing when necessary, it generally worked OK. There were drawbacks, though. Some songs just couldn’t be uploaded there because the rights holders prevented it. Fair enough, I can’t really complain too vigorously about people wanting to keep their shit off of YouTube. But it was a hassle. It was also a little annoying having to prep each song into a video, but that wasn’t that big a deal. The other problem was really YouTube itself. YouTube sucks! If you don’t have an ad blocker or Premium account, the ads are oppressive. Giving Google more traffic is bad! So, after a while, I did soemthing about it.

[Read More]