what have I learned?

It’s now just over a year since I started this blog, and time maybe to review some aspects of the experience. I intend also to analyse some usage statistics in another posting.

a) I originally expected this to be little more than an annotated version of the list I keep of music I’ve performed. Although I sometimes structure entries that way (e.g. the recent entry about Southwark), the blog has moved in a different direction. It’s also a place to ask questions that have occurred to me, and to relate incidents, not necessarily recent, which have amused, puzzled or saddened me, and maybe to get an alternative account of them.

b) My postings have been mostly concerned with performances I’ve taken part in myself, rather than accounts of those I’ve attended or heard on broadcasts. I will try to keep putting in the latter from time to time. I also have some other ideas which I haven’t tried out yet, such as book reviews or descriptions of buildings where I’ve performed. Even within my own performing life, there are some things that are under-represented, such as the music I work on in singing lessons.

c) It’s often observed that some search engines are biased in favour of blogs in the order in which they present their results. I can confirm this; e.g. a search on ‘Exon Singers’ at the time of writing using one popular search engine puts this site above the Exon Singers’ own official home page! (Apologies to the Exon Singers, as writing this has probably made the problem worse.) I have to assume that what I write is likely to be read by anyone I mention by name, or by someone who runs any organisation I name. This puts constraints on what I can say but also makes me feel that what I write here may make a difference somewhere along the line. Keeping close to home tends to generate the most controversy.

d) At a very early stage spammers started posting pseudo-comments. I used the ‘ban IP’ facility but this was really shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Being something of a Perl hacker, I have made some small changes to the scripts and templates provided by Moveable Type to filter out unwanted comments; now fewer than 10% of the attempts to post spam succeed. I’m willing to describe these changes in general terms with anyone who also runs a blog using Moveable Type software. (Conditions of use prohibit me from sharing actual code).