My annual review of the music from this year that I’ve enjoyed listening to most. This is my top ten albums of the year:
Now, this is going to be a niche blog post.
For the last ten years, I’ve been blogging metal, punk, hardcore and rock music reviews at 195metalcds.com.
Besides the main list of reviews, I also created three pages to list the reviews by artist, genre and score. I updated these manually because when I started the blog I hosted it at wordpress.com which had limitations about which themes and plugins I could use. But ever since moving the site to my own paid-hosting account at SiteGround, I’ve wanted to write a plugin or child theme function that could update these three pages automatically. Well, now I have and that’s what this blog post explains.
You can view the code on GitHub.
Continue reading List WordPress posts alphabetically beneath category headings
This evening I previewed the forthcoming album Peace In Our Time (2017) by British five-piece metal masters Krysthla.
Like their debut, this album is amazing. And like their debut, I also gave this 100%.
I fully intend to see them live on their UK tour in May. Who’s with me?
My annual review of what I’ve most enjoyed listening to during the last 12 months, and my albums of the year.
In June 2012 I replied to a post on a local Freecycle mailing list offering “hundreds of metal CDs”. When I got them home I’d been very kindly given around 195 (give or take a few). I’ve been more or less reviewing one CD a week ever since on my 195 metal CDs blog.
Some weeks are easier than others for finding the time to write a review. For albums that I particularly like I sometimes cheekily listen to it for a further week before scribbling down my thoughts.
I’ve been blogging now for well over ten years, so why has it only just occurred to me to get at least one week ahead of myself and review an album at least a week or two in advance?!
That would clearly take the pressure off. I could write the review whenever I wanted and schedule it for the appropriate Monday. As you can see from this image I plan my reviews well in advance using Trello:
So that’s what I’ve done this afternoon. I had a run of albums by Italian black/gothic metal band Opera IX scheduled for the next few weeks so I’ve just grouped them and reviewed them in chronological order this afternoon.
It will be interesting to see what difference this makes in terms of finding the time to review the albums and how much I enjoy them given that the pressure has been relieved a little.