Today being the first #newmusicfriday of 2023, I wanted to tell you about a set of unlisted pages on this site — these are the trackers: simple, plaintext lists of the media I engage with. On the site right now you can find complete lists of Books read; Film & TV watched; Games played; and Music listened to, going back to 2020.
The first three of those trackers work the same way: they’re simple reverse-chronological lists of media I finished (with ★ tags denoting strong recommendations) — nothing more complicated than that. The Music list is a little more complicated, given that it’s essentially a year-long working document that will eventually form the basis of the year end favourite albums list. There’s an explainer at the bottom of the tracker page, if you’re interested.
Hand-in-hand with the trackers, is one more unlisted page: Now. The idea of this page is to provide a glanceable update on what’s currently occupying my time & attention. You can find out what TV series I’m in the middle of; which book(s) I’m currently reading, and so on — check back at your leisure to see what’s new. The concept of the ‘Now’ page was popularised by Derek Sivers, and he runs a site at nownownow.com that collates ‘Now’ pages from all over the indie web. If you have your own site, and it’s something you’re interested in adding, you can find instructions for getting yourself added to the directory here.
Side note: I’m aware that a hefty percentage of posts here in this first part of 2023 have been — as we used to say back in the day — ‘blogging about blogging’. My expectation (and intention) is that that will ease up, or stop entirely, in the near future — not least because I have a self-imposed 2023 moratorium on needless website tinkering!