What's the best way these days to have multiple MT blogs on one page? Also, what criteria do you use to rate your MP3s?

September 9, 2004 9:46 PM

Thursday Tech Two-fer:
(1) What's the best way these days to have multiple MT blogs one one page-- RSS or what? What's the best way to implement this?

2) What criteria do you use to rate your MP3s? For example, does a five-star rating mean all-time best of, best of the artists' work, best within a genre? What rating method do you find most useful?
posted by keswick to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Make one blog your "main" blog, the other the "other" blog.

On the "other blog" template config, make an index template with all the HTML, content, and layout you want where the "OTHER" blog will appear on MAIN blog's page.

In the MAIN blog, do an include to the OTHER blog published index file. Use either SSI or PHP.

3...
4. Profit.

Personally, I don't rate my MP3s, cause I'll be really into a band or album or song for about a month, play it on repeat over and over and over ad infinitum until I get sick of it. That, and I don't really know how to rate them, either.
posted by gramcracker at 10:55 PM on September 9, 2004

1) use the new plugin MultiBlog

2) Personally, I just use ratings to denote what I want to hear. 3 means ho-hum, don't love it, but don't hate it. four means I like the song. Five means I could listen to the song ten times in a row and still want to hear it again. I reserve one and two ratings as a reminder to delete once a month (everything that's a 1 I'll delete periodically when I need HD space on my laptop).
posted by mathowie at 10:59 PM on September 9, 2004

gram: that's how i did it before upgrading to mt 3.1 munged my blog. i was just seeing if there was a better way, because it's been a while since i did that. thanks for the input though :)

mathowie: i've been thinking about using that plug-in. do you use it? happy with it? re: mp3 rating: yeah, that's what I don't understand about the rating-- what's the point of a one-star rating? Why have a MP3 that you don't like? *shrug*
posted by keswick at 11:24 PM on September 9, 2004

1// php includes. less rebuilding.

2.b// Why have a MP3 that you don't like?
because my husband downloaded it, and sometimes (though rarely) we cannot stand each others tastes in music. we share the 'music' directory, but rate the songs on our seperate profiles and/or computers.
posted by rhapsodie at 11:53 PM on September 9, 2004

I don't bother with ratings - play count is a much more reliable measure of what I like.
posted by ascullion at 3:32 AM on September 10, 2004

"2*" is my special rating, and it means. "You need to update the id Tags on this", or "this would be a good song for a Mix" or "This needs to be deleted" or "check out more music from this artist."

I have loads of "2*" rated mp3s, and I've no idea what any of them have been rated for.
posted by seanyboy at 4:15 AM on September 10, 2004

2) Here are some good ideas here for iTunes users. I remember reading one about the problem of making a smart playlist for your unrated songs and then not being able to listen to the songs as you rate them on your computer (once they get a rating, they disappear from the playlist...but it doesn't happen if you use your iPod) and one solution was to use the Party Shuffle feature and set the source to your Unrated smart playlist. Then you can listen and rate randomly, without interruption. Oh, and Ratings Bar makes rating on the fly easier as well for Os Xers.
posted by boost ventilator at 4:40 AM on September 10, 2004

If I was gonna run two MT blogs on one page, I'd have the two MT templates rendering two separate HTML files, then have the reader see the page, with those two files incorporated using Includes.
posted by armoured-ant at 5:09 AM on September 10, 2004

I actually have output from 3 (hah!) blogs, along with a standard header, merged together on my main blog page, using the method gramcracker suggests. I'm using PHP, but SHTML has a marginally lighter impact on server resources.

Basically you set up your sub-blogs to output "stub" files so that when they are included into the main document, everything will run together seamlessly as one good HTML file.

You may need to edit your .htaccess file to parse SHTML or PHP files; you will also need to change MT to attach the appropriate dot-extension to all your files.

I'd also recommend asking questions like this in the MT support forum, where A) you'll find a lot of helpful people, and B) you'll find this question has been asked, like, a jillion times, so you could just search the archives.

As to ratings: in iTunes, I use:
1=blech
2=not so good
3=good
4=very good
5=classic
posted by adamrice at 7:09 AM on September 10, 2004

I know almost nothing about blogs, except that I read some of them, so I have no comments on point 1.

On song ratings....

There is not much of a difference between 3s 4s and 5s for me. I usually just have a random playlist of any songs in that category.

However, I do use the comments section for itunes so that I can have mixes with songs just for the gym, more mellow tunes for reading, etc....

2's are reserved for songs that I am not too fond of today, but after hearing one again I might suddenly like. So, every once in a while I listen to just 2s to see if my opinion of any of those songs has changed.

1s usually stay on the harddrive but get removed from the ipod -- this is for posterity since I have digitized much of my CD collection at this point.
posted by szg8 at 7:33 AM on September 10, 2004

I reserve 1 star ratings for songs that have glitches in them or that I know for a fact I will NEVER want to listen to again. I'll delete these 1-star songs when I get around to it. I rate songs with 2 stars when I just don't like them, though, as I'm a completist in some respects, I don't want to delete the tracks (maybe they make more sense when listening to the album as a whole, but not on a random-shuffle playlist). 3 4 and 5 stars are the tracks that I like and want to hear pop up in random genre-based smart playlists.

the smart playlists that i have setup are usually genre-based and will always filter out the 1 and 2 star songs.

I typically rate songs based on how much I like them within that particular genre, not an "overall" enjoyment (if that makes any sense).
posted by soplerfo at 10:25 AM on September 10, 2004

I mostly use the ratings system in conjunction with the party shuffle and "play higher rated songs more often," thus my ratings are based entirely on how well the songs fit into a random shuffle. As a result, the following types of songs tend to get very low ratings, even if I do like them a lot: songs that only work in the context of an album, rap freestyles, songs with mediocre audio quality, comedy/spoken word tracks, long spacey jams and other hippie music, most jazz/instrumental, and songs that I like but people at my next party might hate (e.g. particularly offensive rap). I also tend to overrate "popular" songs, even if I don't necessarily like them that much.
posted by rorycberger at 11:27 AM on September 10, 2004