After bringing home lyrics and Vibrations, I've moved over 150 music recommendations from Tumblr to my journal.

I'm proud of having found these, written notes, and put them together in a way that's public and shareable. Even better that it's now in a more durable form and offers relatively distraction-free browsing across various music platforms.

They were originally part of my Ephemerata newsletter (2021–2022) and eventually published in a Tumblr blog, but this was either hard to browse as a collection or somehow detached from the rest of my universe. Now that I have a place for everything, it's nicely organized and even has an RSS feed.

Important lesson here that when links break, it's super helpful to have context saved somewhere and not rely on the platform to keep it around for you. For example, this video is currently no longer online, and I haven't tried to replace it yet, but I easily can because of the context that was written as part of my post.

Also nice to see detailed 'via' links crediting people in my community or named publications as the source for certain items.

This is how I would like to share things online: less on social media, more in places I control – at home.

If you're seeking eclectic sounds, you'll find plenty here.

After bringing home lyrics and Vibrations, I've moved over 150 music recommendations from Tumblr to my journal.

I'm proud of having found these, written notes, and put them together in a way that's public and shareable. Even better that it's now in a more durable form and offers relatively distraction-free browsing across various music platforms.

They were originally part of my Ephemerata newsletter (2021–2022) and eventually published in a Tumblr blog, but this was either hard to browse as a collection or somehow detached from the rest of my universe. Now that I have a place for everything, it's nicely organized and even has an RSS feed.

Important lesson here that when links break, it's super helpful to have context saved somewhere and not rely on the platform to keep it around for you. For example, this video is currently no longer online, and I haven't tried to replace it yet, but I easily can because of the context that was written as part of my post.

Also nice to see detailed 'via' links crediting people in my community or named publications as the source for certain items.

This is how I would like to share things online: less on social media, more in places I control – at home.

If you're seeking eclectic sounds, you'll find plenty here.

I've reorganized my homepage a bit.

1. Much less scrolling is needed now.
2. Larger lists have been broken into smaller lists which are easier to orient.
3. Mixing writing into each section makes way more sense. (I learn more and more: don't sort by type).
4. It's deliberately a bit rough so that I can fix things later.

I had more grandiose ideas, but this will do for the moment. Feels good to improve so much without a big 'redesign'.

The last update in 2021 was quite dramatic for me, going from pure icons to text; slowly considering more the reader over 'aesthetic'.

This is part of some things I'm doing for the 20th anniversary of my domain. More to come this year.

I've reorganized my homepage a bit.

1. Much less scrolling is needed now.
2. Larger lists have been broken into smaller lists which are easier to orient.
3. Mixing writing into each section makes way more sense. (I learn more and more: don't sort by type).
4. It's deliberately a bit rough so that I can fix things later.

I had more grandiose ideas, but this will do for the moment. Feels good to improve so much without a big 'redesign'.

The last update in 2021 was quite dramatic for me, going from pure icons to text; slowly considering more the reader over 'aesthetic'.

This is part of some things I'm doing for the 20th anniversary of my domain. More to come this year.

High off the fumes from bringing Vibrations home, I made a "room" for all the lyrics I've accumulated over the years from capoeira classes, deep listening albums, and learning languages, motivated because there were too many mixed into my notes and other stuff to find anything when I needed it.

informal to structured, automatically

Each song lives in a collection, which is a text file representing my personal tie to where it came from: maybe the year or place or group or album.

The lyrics in a collection are just separated by one # character, which represents a Markdown heading. New heading, new song; no need to "make one file per thing" and manage it.

…

quem ama mesmo prefere o ofício de amar.

# Joyce: Mistérios

você chegou feito um silêncio

…

With just this one semantic unit to divide the information, each song can get it's own page automatically. But I can still easily move things around if I change my mind. This fulfills my principle of "presenting things consistently regardless of how I organize the files".

Adding a topic to collections lets me combine collections from a certain context (such as my Brazilian popular music). As it shows recent items first, I have a list roughly in order of discovery without any 'blog post' system; time is somewhat relevant but it doesn't need to be super precise.

I had tried to do this with my non-chronological garden, but it was too much effort to manage pages and ended up crowding other stuff without being easier to find. Reverse chronological order is much more relevant here to me than other ways I've tried, as I often want to revisit newer things first; the order is a helpful reminder of where I got it from and orients me to other details I may have forgotten.

cool benefits

About 150 individual song notes were purged from my Simplenote and condensed into 21 collections. I no longer need to carry them around in my notes, and they're also 'liberated' as public data that anyone can benefit from as text or through my site's web interface.

Collections are presented without pagination so I can just scroll, with sticky headings for orientation, using the browser to search when needed: this way I can easily save one page offline with the Reading List in Safari and have lyrics with me even without internet access.

The page for any song has links to search the title via YouTube, or translate text via DeepL, or a 'Source' link so that anyone can edit things on GitHub.

There are bidirectional links between lyric and Vibrations pages, connecting published songs from my personal history to the lyrics.

other reflections

I'm generally not using my blog brain when I deal with music and don't always know very specifically what I'm looking for when it comes to songs I may want to reconnect with. It's nice to browse through what I've gathered as easily as physical albums or photo collections—an example of how technology can support more 'fuzzy' approaches.

I have another less public collection somewhere with compilations of more lyrics than I will ever use in my lifetime, but those are more like a large 'dataset' and not personally meaningful. The songs I've encountered along my way have more significance to me, and it's nice to express that through files, markdown, and some rough technical transformation.

My endeavour in writing this is not really to focus on the technology but an attempt to share why I do things a certain way, which can be applicable to other things.

Hugo gives me the rush of making apps, but applied to organizing information—something that disproportionately seems to satisfy me.

I would close with a quote from Heddi that describes what it's like for me to have a personal website or corner of the Internet where I can do niche things like this without some company's blessing:

"Having a platform profile is like living in a single-room apartment, whereas having your own site is a castle with unlimited rooms."

High off the fumes from bringing Vibrations home, I made a "room" for all the lyrics I've accumulated over the years from capoeira classes, deep listening albums, and learning languages, motivated because there were too many mixed into my notes and other stuff to find anything when I needed it.

informal to structured, automatically

Each song lives in a collection, which is a text file representing my personal tie to where it came from: maybe the year or place or group or album.

The lyrics in a collection are just separated by one # character, which represents a Markdown heading. New heading, new song; no need to "make one file per thing" and manage it.

…

quem ama mesmo prefere o ofício de amar.

# Joyce: Mistérios

você chegou feito um silêncio

…

With just this one semantic unit to divide the information, each song can get it's own page automatically. But I can still easily move things around if I change my mind. This fulfills my principle of "presenting things consistently regardless of how I organize the files".

Adding a topic to collections lets me combine collections from a certain context (such as my Brazilian popular music). As it shows recent items first, I have a list roughly in order of discovery without any 'blog post' system; time is somewhat relevant but it doesn't need to be super precise.

I had tried to do this with my non-chronological garden, but it was too much effort to manage pages and ended up crowding other stuff without being easier to find. Reverse chronological order is much more relevant here to me than other ways I've tried, as I often want to revisit newer things first; the order is a helpful reminder of where I got it from and orients me to other details I may have forgotten.

cool benefits

About 150 individual song notes were purged from my Simplenote and condensed into 21 collections. I no longer need to carry them around in my notes, and they're also 'liberated' as public data that anyone can benefit from as text or through my site's web interface.

Collections are presented without pagination so I can just scroll, with sticky headings for orientation, using the browser to search when needed: this way I can easily save one page offline with the Reading List in Safari and have lyrics with me even without internet access.

The page for any song has links to search the title via YouTube, or translate text via DeepL, or a 'Source' link so that anyone can edit things on GitHub.

There are bidirectional links between lyric and Vibrations pages, connecting published songs from my personal history to the lyrics.

other reflections

I'm generally not using my blog brain when I deal with music and don't always know very specifically what I'm looking for when it comes to songs I may want to reconnect with. It's nice to browse through what I've gathered as easily as physical albums or photo collections—an example of how technology can support more 'fuzzy' approaches.

I have another less public collection somewhere with compilations of more lyrics than I will ever use in my lifetime, but those are more like a large 'dataset' and not personally meaningful. The songs I've encountered along my way have more significance to me, and it's nice to express that through files, markdown, and some rough technical transformation.

My endeavour in writing this is not really to focus on the technology but an attempt to share why I do things a certain way, which can be applicable to other things.

Hugo gives me the rush of making apps, but applied to organizing information—something that disproportionately seems to satisfy me.

I would close with a quote from Heddi that describes what it's like for me to have a personal website or corner of the Internet where I can do niche things like this without some company's blessing:

"Having a platform profile is like living in a single-room apartment, whereas having your own site is a castle with unlimited rooms."

I'm starting a process to collect my online publishing across various platforms into one 'home'.

Music was the easiest to setup because it doesn't involve dealing with existing systems of mine.

You can see what it's like at rosano.ca/vibrations.

Vibrations

It's hard to have an overview on YouTube as they only order things by date upload, and also separate some videos into 'Shorts'.

By contrast:

1. I now have everything on one page,
2. videos are ordered based on my actual chronology,
3. and some even show the recording date.

It's crazy to perceive the psychological impact of no platform, no ads, and no random obfuscation of my work: I can browse and experience in peace.

metadata details

One thing I find cool is how I can derive the local time and place of any post with my travel data.

Every page also has a "Source" link to view the original file (like the one for this post). A reader can easily correct something, or add tags if it makes sense.

And the there are direct social media links saved from crossposting with n8n or manually.

One last detail is that I've mixed these with log entries to see them in a richer time context; see 2024 for an example of how this mixes together.

vibes

My inner librarian really gets excited by this sort of thing. I love information density, organizing things a certain way, and the potential to fill in more details as time goes on; I would like this site to become a very precise opinion about how that should be.

Might be worth mentioning that this is powered by Hugo, which seems to always have an elegant place for things to rest; I described some of the features I used on their forum.

It feels cool to see so many parts of fragmented systems coming together. With search engines becoming increasingly hostile toward finding things, these approaches remind me of older internetting ways: links that don't break, having multiple ways to discover things, openly accessible without ads, and maybe owning more of your data.

I'm starting a process to collect my online publishing across various platforms into one 'home'.

Music was the easiest to setup because it doesn't involve dealing with existing systems of mine.

You can see what it's like at rosano.ca/vibrations.

Vibrations

It's hard to have an overview on YouTube as they only order things by date upload, and also separate some videos into 'Shorts'.

By contrast:

1. I now have everything on one page,
2. videos are ordered based on my actual chronology,
3. and some even show the recording date.

It's crazy to perceive the psychological impact of no platform, no ads, and no random obfuscation of my work: I can browse and experience in peace.

metadata details

One thing I find cool is how I can derive the local time and place of any post with my travel data.

Every page also has a "Source" link to view the original file (like the one for this post). A reader can easily correct something, or add tags if it makes sense.

And the there are direct social media links saved from crossposting with n8n or manually.

One last detail is that I've mixed these with log entries to see them in a richer time context; see 2024 for an example of how this mixes together.

vibes

My inner librarian really gets excited by this sort of thing. I love information density, organizing things a certain way, and the potential to fill in more details as time goes on; I would like this site to become a very precise opinion about how that should be.

Might be worth mentioning that this is powered by Hugo, which seems to always have an elegant place for things to rest; I described some of the features I used on their forum.

It feels cool to see so many parts of fragmented systems coming together. With search engines becoming increasingly hostile toward finding things, these approaches remind me of older internetting ways: links that don't break, having multiple ways to discover things, openly accessible without ads, and maybe owning more of your data.