Recently, as one of the writers of this blog, I made the decision to add a music widget called Sonific to this blog.  Apparently, the music player, Sonific, was hard to see even though it appears at the very top right of the blog each day.  It appears that the addition has had mixed reviews according to you, gentle readers.

In one of our posts here, the discussion turned to readers hearing the sound but not knowing where it was coming from. So, this post is to help clear the air and inform everyone about where the music player is located and the changes that have been made to the player itself.

Here is what the widget looks like now that we have made it more visible rather than seamless:

The background is now a bubbly blue rather than the seamless white.  Also note the play button. The widget was originally made to play automatically which I personally thought readers would enjoy but it is clear that I was wrong about that so the default is now to have the player remain inactive unless readers click the play button to activate it (so click play and enjoy if you so choose otherwise it will just be an ad for whatever song is playing that day).

Also, the song selected (it was meant to be changed daily to add a nice change of pace and tone to the posts) will not repeat as also in the original default.  The slider bar works like any other – adjust up or down as you see fit once you’ve engaged the player.

There was another video player called Streamcast that I made a post about but the stream was getting clipped.  That might be a better way to introduce music in a less intrusive way down the road.  It is interesting how readers co-opt blogs.  As 2ADay is a personal web log (blog), you would think we could do whatever we want and we could if we wanted to annoy our readers but then that would be counter productive wouldn’t it?

A friend of mine put it best.  Writing a blog without an audience is liking wanting to hook up with a girl at a party and winking at her in the dark.  You know what you are doing but she has no idea.

So, thanks for the feedback on the new song widget.  It will stay up for a bit longer as we test out if readers like the option of engaging it while those that loathed the intrusion won’t ever have to worry about it again.