Honestly, I probably have more fun than anyone else with the Friday 10.

Some thoughts after the first few weeks of my lyric guessing game.

We seem to be wrapping up this week’s Friday 10. As I am writing this, there’s only one lyric left.

This specific game — one of my favorites from the golden age of weblogs — was the primary reason I added comments here. That’s been a larger challenge than I anticipated at the time, partly because I had to build the commenting system from scratch but also because the kind of hosting I’m using is very different from what I did twenty years ago. I wrote about that elsewhere if you’re interested.

Working on this game has been a great deal of fun, and I have to thank everyone who has been playing so far. It wouldn’t be nearly so much fun without seeing other people having a good time with it.

But it’s been a special experience for me.

First, there’s the technical aspect. The last time I ran this game I was using WordPress. The content production effort there was tedious. Whenever someone answered correctly, I had to open the blog post, edit my post with the new markup for the answered question, and then save it again. I also had to keep the answers in a separate document because sometimes I, too, would forget what song I was thinking of.

This time the Friday 10 relies on a data structure I’ve attached to each post. It includes the lyric, artist, song title, and YouTube link. All I have to do with a correct answer is edit that data structure to add the name of the person who guessed correctly, then re-publish the site. All the markup changes are handled for me.

This has opened up a lot of ideas I have for better presentation. Like, instead of directing to YouTube I could open a modal with the video inside it. I’ve even been looking at integrating with Discogs to show more information about the artist and song. Or I could find ways to pull information from Wikipedia or Genius… the ideas just stack up.

It’s not that I couldn’t do that in WordPress. I just think the labor would have been prohibitive and not nearly as much fun as it’s been in my current setup.

The game has also had me listening to music a lot more as opposed to turning it on as background noise. Like a lot of folks I think I’ve fallen into the trap of listening only to familiar material or non-disruptive music (like Lofi Girl) in the background.

I used to enjoy music a lot more deliberately. Finding songs, looking up lyrics, and then finding interesting performances to attach to the answers has been highly rewarding.

Does anyone watch those videos? I don’t know, I don’t track much in the way of analytics. I watch them though, sometimes multiple times when I find one I really like.

But perhaps the most fun for me has been the conversation these posts have sparked with people outside this blog about lyrics in general, specific lyrics, or specific artists. I get to talk about music again. For the last several years, this weblog (and the sister film blog, FilmHydra) have felt like little tiny islands just waiting for a circumnavigating pilot to crash into them.

Adding comments, and then coming up with something to have people comment about, has made this feel more like a tiny community. I used to think blogs didn’t need — even shouldn’t have — comments. I’ve changed my mind about that.