It seems like I routinely get tired of writing blogs, or loose the will to do so. This time though I’ll try not to delete this blog and start anew like I did the last 3-4 times. Consider this some kind of break while I get more ideas and whatnot.

I’m spending more time focusing on programming and learning shit rather than playing music and reviewing it these days, sorry. I’m sure it’ll come back at some point though, may it be this autumn when my bass lessons start again and I grow more musical motivation. Who knows.

Until then, I invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed rather than visiting the page here and then. Hey, thanks for reading, regulars!

This is what this is about. Overstretched images of money.

Selling out

Watching the stats for this site, I realized I didn’t quite a lot of viewers, but still a few, and a good amount of them being newcomers. I’ve been thinking about adding ads to the site. However, I don’t want to clutter the view of readers, much less have anything like interstitials or audio ads. In fact, if I could, I’d launch the people making them into the sun.

In any case, the site is certainly not free to host, and I possibly could cover the costs with some ad money. So I’m asking the regulars who feel like commenting if they feel like I should put up ads, and if so, where?

Places I’ve thought about were:

• The sidebar: I’m not too sure about that one, the design is not really made to support that;
• After a post and before the comments: Good way not to annoy most viewers, although those who’ll see the ads will be the regulars. Best time/visit ratio.
• Through a post: Just kidding, that annoys me and I don’t want to implement that.

So yeah, I’ve kept very few places where to put them. Your input is wanted, so leave a comment, suggest new places, tell me not to put any ad, you help me decide.

That baby is amazed because there is a post on this very blog. The open mouth represents surprise, and it’s also kind of disgusting. It could also make me look like a kind of weird fetishist to post mouths as update images twice in a row.

Explain yourself, young man!

I feel like I have to explain a bit why the blog went kind of dead all of a sudden. The reason is pretty simple: I had some other stuff to do and didn’t feel like updating too much. My internship just finished last week, I got a new bass, and gave myself a lot of stress about the projects I was doing at work, which led me to a certain lack of time and motivation to listen to music and review it.

Unfortunately, this week is not going to be better. I’ve got practices for a show, a show (in fact 2), a show that doesn’t have me performing in it, some appointments, etc. So, next week? Yes, hopefully! I still don’t know what I’m going to review. I’ve got some Gryphon and Premiata Forneria Marconi that’s been laying around for a while and that I wanted people to discover. I also have some stuff being prepared about ridiculous audiophile equipment, if that’s interesting.

Lately, I’ve been trying to move a bit away from just reviews (which gave birth to posts like Phil Collins Sucks), but I have no idea what you regular readers like the most, so just give a few comments, it could guide me. It’s not like I like doing one more than the other, I still have some fun doing so. Keep visiting (or subscribe to the RSS feed) for more news!

Oh hello you metaphor of time that flies by, while we age and get wrinkly skin and then regret our young days. Finally, a picture that fits!

So given this is my break week before going on my internship and then hopefully landing a web development job there, I’m also taking a small break this week and using it to make a post about how this blog has now existed for a whole month.

Let’s get some statistics

First, the content:

• 10 blog posts, which include;
• 2 Blog news posts (this article is counted),
• 1 General post,
• 1 instrument post,
• 5 Album reviews,
• 1 video post.
• 31 comments
• 1 Free CD (hooray!)

That’s a good indicator of the direction this site is taking, I guess, although it’s still real short.

Then the visitors:

• 1,120 page views
• 495 visitors in total
• 405 unique visitors

Well, considering there is no advertisement and a few friends frequently read this, it’s not too bad for a first month, really. The average number of page viewed by visitor is of 2.26, but only 30% of the readers get to read more than 1 page only. In parallel, 70% of visits lasted 10 seconds or less. That’s kind of good actually, because when putting these statistics together, it could mean that most people who come and stay for more than 10 seconds are likely to visit more than one page. Quite good for content, although a 70% rebound rate is not always the best thing.

Your browser comes from a junkyard

In my first post at the beginning of this blog, I said the following thing:

I’m likely to keep fixing bugs as they come and gradually insert content, so report anything you see that is wrong (except the .PNG images in IE6, I decided to make what I thought would look good rather than make it compatible on browsers which I’m not sure my reader(s) use).

Well, google analytics returned me some results. while roughly 90% of parseidon.com readers do use browsers that most likely support png transparency, 10% still stick to the old clunky IE6, which manages to make things look royally ugly. Too bad for them, I’d say. I still only test my layouts for IE7, FF (and indirectly most mozilla-based browsers), Opera and Safari when I get around a Mac. For curious people, here’s the repartition:

• 51% of users use Firefox (~90% of them use 2.0 or higher)
• 30% use Internet Explorer (~60% IE7, ~30% IE6, nobody uses anything older, thank God)
• 9% use Opera
• 7.5% use Safari
• 2.5% use other browsers (Mozilla, mainly).

How the hell did I land here?

Well, google analytics answers this too. Around 33% of you readers come here on your own will, by typing the good old “http://parseidon.com” (or variations of it) in your address bar. Thank you you good followers, I guess. Google and other search engines then send me most visitors. Most used query words are relative to:

1. Kaizers Orchestra - Maskineri reviews
2. Various 7 For 4 searches (good enough, considering I reviewed all their albums)
3. Medeski, Martin & Wood - Let’s go everywhere searches (lots of people are looking for torrents! you criminals!)
4. The rest is mainly random keywords about music and content of my older blog.

No idea for this title

So yeah, I guess I could say I’m satisfied with how this blog does so far. I’m curious to see how I’ll do with the new schedule kicking in next week, but I will surely try and take the time to review and look for more stuff. I’ve been wanting to review Gordian knot’s eponym for a while, chapman sticks aren’t widely used around. Stay tuned or whatever, and comments are always appreciated. It’s pretty much the only feedback one can get all in all.

Edit: As of March 18, 2008, I’ve removed the video category and moved the only post in there to the “General” category.

This image may bear symbolism about this blog and its future, but nobody can be sure of it.

The beginning

Well, this is it. I’m throwing away a lot of stuff again, and starting over. I’ve worked on this current template for a while, and it’s now mostly ready. I’m likely to keep fixing bugs as they come and gradually insert content, so report anything you see that is wrong (except the .PNG images in IE6, I decided to make what I thought would look good rather than make it compatible on browsers which I’m not sure my reader(s) use).

At first, I wanted to write my own CMS, but I decided against it and came back to Wordpress, proven to work, and with better security than I could have myself. So here we are.

The content

As of now, nothing is too sure about the content this blog will have. Music will be a part of it for sure: tutorials, album reviews (and linking to places that uploaded them, possibly), general content about music, videos, some discoveries to be done, interesting reading and links about it all, etc.

The Author

I’m a Web Developer, currently going on an internship. Otherwise, I’m a musician who has played electric bass for about 4 years and a half now. I mainly do improvisation and try to get better at it. As far as genres go, I’m usually listening to Progressive Rock, Jazz, Fusion, Funk, Classic Rock, Classical Music, Klezmer, Folk, Psychedelic, Avant-garde and Experimental, and so on. This will be the kind of albums I’ll review, the music I’ll suggest too.