What's Happening: Week of September 24, 2018

I currently have no new music in the pipeline this week, but am considering making changes to my website.

I was poking around on Pond5 and noticed something. It turns out that part of that site's recent makeover included a new wrinkle. I noticed that they now use HTML to embed media in the artist forums, forsaking Flash in the process. This is potentially huge, because browsers now don't particularly like Flash due to security concerns. I myself stopped using Flash to embed files on this site, choosing instead to create and host my own mp3 preview files and then use HTML audio code to embed the previews.

I sent a request to Pond5 asking if it they would have a problem with me using HTML code to embed files in my own site. They provide different ways of integrating content, but most of these involve some combination of PHP/JavaScript/AJAX and I'm not in the mood to do that much coding. However, if I can embed HTML in the pages then it becomes a simple matter to install WordPress and use the built-in audio shortcode. If I can do that, then I'll probably look to migrate my current one-page site to WP and host a lot of audio previews there. That would allow me to use WP categories and tags to create a keyword-rich site environment that would be awesome for SEO. But first, we'll have to see what P5 has to say.

My featured stock music item this week is Dramatic Sorrow. It's a plaintive piece with classical guitar and orchestra. I hope you'll check it out. Maybe next week I'll preview my featured item here with HTML embedding from Pond5. For that matter, if it works out well and I migrate the main site to WordPress, I may just consider migrating this blog there as well.