I’ve been busy, as you may have noticed from the complete lack of posts. I’ve spent far too much time behind my laptop, probably getting more of a tan off the lcd rays than the sun outside. I am starting to think summer ain’t coming this year.

The only thing keeping me relatively sane is Lastfm, a social music community website. I’ve been using Lastfm for a while now, off and on though, never exploring its potential completely. Up until now I have found it’s usability a bit complicated. For a new user it is hard working out what is the difference between a playlist and a radio station, why you can only play 30 seconds of a song sometimes, yet the full song other times, and why you need to use the stand alone player as well as the website.
However, the last few days I have been playing around with it a lot, and it’s not as complicated as i thought. I was just too lazy to work it out. I’ve had it running during ever second of “office” hours, it has replaced my radio. I have bought a two month trial membership for 3 pounds (which has enabled some great features), I’ve fine tuned my playlists, discovered new artists, met other users, and now I can share it all with you. In my side menu on my home page you will see a new widget, “My Personal Radio”.

Forget 5FM. Forget Virgin UK. Press play, sit back and enjoy. DJ Mad Mark in the mix. Let me know if our music tastes are a match.

P.S. According to WatchFire WebXACT, which I use to monitor my website’s performance, the Lastfm player has added 79kb to my home page’s load time. I’ll leave it up for a few days, but please let me know if it’s terribly slow. I’ll probably move it to my About page.