Welcome to my new blog.
This blog is the successor to my Hit of the Week Updates which I maintained from 1999 through 2010. Let’s just say that any website that was started in 1999 and has not had significant upgrades beyond the actual content is starting to show its age.
When I first started the Hit of the Week most people still connected to the Internet with dial up and RealAudio was the best and most commonly used format for anyone who wished to stream audio over low bandwidth connections. And whenever I posted a Hit of the Week update, I had to generate the html and manually archive my previous posting. Towards the end, I added an RSS feed – which I had to manually create for each and every posting.
The software that powers my new blog will automate a lot of the work that I had to do every time I posted and will, hopefully, enable me to post more frequently than I was able to during the final year or so of the Hit of the Week updates.
Another thing that will save time and enable me to post more frequently is a slight change in format. Rather than every update featuring multiple popular music recordings and a short essay plus an “extra” section featuring multiple recordings from different musical genres and an additional essay, postings here will usually feature less commentary and fewer recordings per posting.
Finally, I am pairing this blog with a Twitter account from I will be sending out frequent “tweets” recommending and linking to the same sort of music that others are making available on the web. The nice thing about posting to Twitter is it only takes less than a minute to do so. So if things become too busy and I do not have time to put up a posting here, chances are good that I will at least have time to post something to Twitter.
If you do not have a Twitter account of your own, you can still follow mine either by going to my Twitter Page or by following the Recent Tweets section in the right hand column of this blog.
My new blog also comes with all sorts of neat bells and whistles. The icons you will see after each posting will enable you to share and pass it along to friends either though email or various social networking sites – a great way that you can help to bring any recordings here you especially like to the wider audience that they deserve.
The blog also, by default, also includes comments. For now, I am going to leave the comments feature turned on to see how well they work out. If I end up having to spend too much time weeding out spam I might, unfortunately, have no choice but to turn the comments off.
Also, just so that there are no potentially hard feelings – please do not be offended if I fail to reply back to any comments. This blog is a hobby – something that I do in my free time. There are times when my real world commitments and various necessary chores and errands crowd out the time I can responsibly spend on my various hobbies.
Nevertheless, this is a hobby that I get a great deal of enjoyment from and through which I have met many wonderful people. Over the past year I became so busy with other projects that something had to give – and I decided that it would have to be the Hit of the Week updates so that I would at least still have time to work on Radio Dismuke. But I did enjoy putting the Hit of the Week updates together and have missed doing so. I hope to get similar enjoyment from this new blog – and hope that those who followed and enjoyed my Hit of the Week updates over the years will as well.
Radio Dismuke