Friday, May 16, 2008

Music and Lyrics

Bryan Adams live in La Plaza de Yoros Nuevo Progreso in Guadalajara, Jalisco, MexicoImage via WikipediaFrigga over at Any Apples plays a little game on Fridays called 'Rockin' With Frigga' - she posts some song lyrics, and the first person to name the song and artist gets a point. It's fun to play, though I admit I don't know most of the songs she posts. Once in a while she'll use a song I know, and sometimes I go hunting down the lyrics just to figure it out. Once I find the song lyrics, I like to go find the song and listen to at least a little bit of it.

Usually that means searching for it on YouTube or something like that. Today, though, I found a site that combines the lyrics and the song on one page - TSRocks. From what I can see, there are tons of songs on this site. You can go immediately to some of the popular artists on the site, or you can search through the artists to find the one you're looking for. They're arranged alphabetically, so it's pretty easy, except it's alphabetically by first name and not last name, as I learned when I started searching for Bryan Adams under the A's, for Adams. He wasn't there. He was under the B's, for Bryan.

I was searching because he was on Regis and Kelly this morning, started performing one of my favorite songs, and they cut him off. How rude! So I looked him up on this site and played the song there. They even give you the code to embed the song:


Read Run To You lyrics


I love being able to listen to the song and read the lyrics at the same time because I'm very visual and usually can't understand the lyrics just from listening to the song, without having a chance to read them. This site isn't going to help me with Frigga's game, because I can't search for lyrics there, but it is going to make it easy for me to listen to the songs once I know what they are.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Looking for Fonts?

Somehow in the switch from my old computer to my new one, I lost some fonts. The old computer had a lot of fonts. I copied the font folder, which is a good thing, because the old computer died, and all those fonts would have been lost forever! Still, some of the fonts are missing, and I have no idea what happened to them. Today I was looking for one in particular - Bazooka. I didn't find it, but I did find dafont.com, a whole site full of fonts. They're all either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain.

If you're looking for new fonts or the perfect font for a particular project, you just might find it at dafont.com. If you know where I can find my Bazooka font, please let me know!

Friday, May 2, 2008

Windows Live Writer

I recently downloaded Windows Live Writer and have been using it to post to my blogs.  So far I have set up three of my blogs, counting this one, and can easily post to any of them.  It works with most major blog services including WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad, and it automatically detects your blog's theme.  As you write, you can see just how it will look on your blog, before you publish.

Windows Live Writer makes it easy to insert graphics, hyperlinks, tables, maps, and more.  Also, if you can't be connected to the Internet, you can still write your posts, and they'll be ready to publish when you get back online.  I used this feature last week, and it was so nice.

You can read about all the features of Windows Live Writer here.  I also downloaded some Plug-ins to extend the features.  One of them is this Polaroid Picture Plug-in I haven't tried until now.

That's kind of cool, but the Plug-in I have high hopes for is one that is supposed to let me easily blog a page or selection of a page right from my browser.  That will be particularly helpful for this blog.  When I see something I want to share, I just have to select the "Blog This" button at the top of my browser, and it will open a new or existing post in Windows Live Writer.  Then, I can easily share what I just found. 

Because, even though I'm always running across things I get really excited about, I still find myself forgetting to bookmark, forgetting to share, and losing them.  That is not good.