Sorry, just a quick rant here. I’ve always been a WordPress fan for blogging. It was probably the first blogging platform I tried and its probably the most popular out there as far as self-installations. There are actually many sites running WordPress that would not really be considered “blogs”, but that’s not the point of this post anyway…

It seems Blogger.com has taken the world by storm. I expected that to happen once Google bought them. Google certainly has the midas touch. They have improved the platform greatly too. They’ve made blogging so easy that my mother-in-law could blog! 😉

So here comes my rant. Blogger (aka blogspot) is great and all, but there is one feature that everyone seems to use that I absolutely abhore. It is the little music player that people keep putting on their sites. You know the one… the little flash player embedded from playlist.com. OK, I know its technically not Blogger.com, but seriously, that is the only place I see people using this horrid gadget!

I know a lot of my family and friends have this on their site, I don’t mean to offend… wait, yes I do. Take it off! I don’t want to hear the beginning of your favorite songs, really, I don’t.

It’s not that I don’t like your favorite songs, it’s just so much more:

1. The player doesn’t actually start intil it appears in the viewable area of your screen. This is OK. Some people put this at the bottom. So once I get done looking at your recent posts, I probably want to hear the intro to your favorite latest hit before I move on. If not, I’ll just hit the button to stop it.
2. Speaking of the button to stop it, I believe the only way to do so is to hit pause. That button is so small! That is just annoying. It should be the largest button on the player.
3. What’s the average length of a song? I’d say probably 3-5 minutes. What is the average amount of time a person stays on a web page? Probably about 5 seconds. OK, so with blogs, it may be a bit longer, but no more than a minute, unless you’ve really written a novel. But seriously, no one is going to still around just to listen to your songs. I would guess that someone is on a blog post page no more than an average of 30 seconds. There may be execeptions, but your blog is not one of them!
4. I use [[tabbed browsing]]. Sometimes I’ll go to my list of blogs and middle-click each one to open them all in tabs to see what everyone is up to. Yeah, I know I’m not normal, but this saves me a lot of time because I don’t have to wait for each of them to load individually. A few of this have this playlist in the visible screen area they start playing. Now if listening to one person’s music was not annoying enough, now I have 3 or 4 trying to play together. It makes for the worst kind of [[Mashup_(music)|mashup]]. I’ve got to go through each of my tabs, find the offenders, then try to click that stupid tiny pause button!
5. Maybe I’m closed minded because I don’t care to know what your favorite songs are. Maybe I have my own favorite music. Maybe I happen to be listening to it when I come browsing to your blog. Maybe your favorite songs seriously clash with my favorite songs. Ever think of that?Of course not, or you wouldn’t torture me so!
6. For those of you that put this playlist in your menu or footer or header, or generally somewhere that gets loaded on every page. Stop it! Have you noticed that if you click a post title you can then read the entire post and the comments associated with it? So when you do this, your little music player will have to reload and will generally pick a new song. Well, I guess that is a feature. I would hate to hear the first 10 seconds of the same song on every page. At least there is a new song to annoy me on every page, and I know exactly where to find that tiny little pause button immediately.
7. You’re killing my bandwidth. Yeah, I have high speed internet so it’s not that bad, but back to the tabbed browseing issue. When these things start playing, they are streaming music. That is going to slow down the load time of all my other players until I can get you to stop. So again, do me a favor and get rid of that thing!
8. Sometime my wife likes to catch up of friends and family through their blogs. This can be done on the laptop in bed. If the speakers happens to be left on and she comes across your blog, we would just like to personally thank you for waking our sleeping children to your awesome music. It’s probably their favorite music too.
9. I use a tool called Enounce MySpeed. It’s a niftly little gadget that allows me to speed up flash videos and watch them 2 or 3 times as fast. This is mostly helpful when I watch online video tuturials and such. There’s a slight problem though. It also seems to work on this little playlist player. So, as I’m scrolling down your page and get to the part of your menu where you’ve plugged in this wicked-sweet-gadget you found. Up pops my MySpeed controller and I just happen to be scrolling my mouse wheel still. Now your music plays 3 times as fast! That would be great since now I may actually get to hear more than the first 5 seconds, but its not great, really. I have to reset my MySpeed control back to normal and close it and find your stupid tiny pause button again. OK, so this one is not really your fault, it’s mine for wanting to get more information in less time. I’ll give you that one. Still, it is annoying enough to make the list.
10. It’s so [[MySpace]]-ish!

So if the above reasons are not enough for you to remove your playlist and you find pleasure in annoying me, I’ll burst your bubble now and just say, nevermind, don’t worry about it. I’ll just be visiting your blog using Firefox and Adblock Plus. I found that this playlist was on multiple domains such as profileplaylist.net, musicplaylist.us, etc. But I found this filter worked rather well: “*/mc/*.swf?config=*”

Lest I leave you sad and disappointed because you can see my point and agree with me, let me give you a suggestion. Why don’t you create a page (a page would be better than a post for this one in my opinion) that has your little playlist player on it. That way I could come to your site and IF I’m interested in seeing/hearing your favorite songs, I’ll check out your favorite songs page. I might even say, “Wow, cool, I like that song too!”, but probably not. There, win-win!