Wednesday, March 14, 2012

In Which I Plug a Couple Websites

I was trying to figure out if the blog was a good place to share this, and then I remembered it was my blog and I could do whatever I wanted.

Not knitting. Not gardening. MUSIC and BOOKS.

It's a minor annoyance of mine that I might not know about an album release by my favorite artists or book release by my favorite authors until I stumble upon it months later.

If Facebook can tell me about the children of people I haven't seen in fifteen years and don't care about, there has to be an easy technological way to fix this problem.

Apparently, there is.

www.authoralerts.com lets you create a free account with your e-mail address and enter your favorite authors. They keep track of upcoming releases. I haven't been e-mailed by them yet, so I can't say exactly how this will work, but all signs point to it doing what I want.

http://www.music-alerts.com/ is a piece of genius that lets you enter musical artists separated by commas. Then it creates a feed that can be added to your reader. I use Google Reader obsessively, so I added it there. I found out about recently-released or soon-to-be-released albums from Train, Ingrid Michaelson, Evanescence and Counting Crows that I added to my wishlist.

Both websites are free. In fact, the music-alerts website doesn't even require a login. Author alerts requires a login with your e-mail address.

I hope this is helpful information for you! If not, rest assured that I'll be blathering on about my usual topics again soon.

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