who are you ???

hello. i am lucy.

i like music and computers and programming and cats and things such as that!

you can also check out my main website at lx12.net (if you’re awesome)

what is this ?????

it’s kind of like my own personal letterboxd but for music. it’s inspired by lilacboxd, which is run by somebody that I know. I recommended using Hugo and it looked so fun that I decided that I wanted to make something similar :)

how are reviews scored ?????????

can you stop with the question marks. where are you getting all of those.

there are two scores that get calculated (automatically! see the workflow) for every review. both are good for different measurements, so both are shown

average

a simple average score for all the tracks in the release.

works well, but fails to factor in the length of the release. I personally think an album of twelve 8.5/10 tracks is superior to an EP of three 10/10 tracks.

weighted

my solution to this problem! it’s a small algebraic equation, so lets define some variables.

t = number of tracks
a = average score from all tracks
b = baseline number of tracks for no multiplier (set to 8)
w = weight factor, how much the weight affects the score (set to 0.5)

so, let’s use The Money Store by Death Grips as an example.

t = 13
a = 8.23
b = 8 (this is always 8)
w = 0.5 (this is always 0.5)

we can now calculate our weighted score:

weight = ((t / b) - 1.0) * w = 0.3125
multiplier = 1.0 + weight = 1.3125
weighted_score = a * multiplier = 10.80

since there were 13 tracks, the weighted score is 131.2% of the average score.

what’s the workflow >:)

it’s pretty cool in my opinion.

1. write my review in Obsidian

I have a folder in my Obsidian vault that contains all of the markdown files for every page you see here. I’m able to use obsidian’s fancy features like note properties (literally just stored as yaml lmao) to have a really nice (and portable, even from my phone!) experience writing reviews for music.

I then just write my review, with a separate h2 for each song, and this weird looking shortcode at the bottom, which tells Hugo the score I’m giving each song:

At the end of the review, I have this other shortcode:

which is all I need to do, unless if I want to write something extra in the conclusion.

2. Hugo Publish Obsidian plugin

this plugin is maybe the most self explanatory thing of all time. I press a button in the app and my Obsidian-style markdown gets translated into normal markdown, which is mostly the same but handles links differently.

The original page comes from Obsidian Vault/lxstens/reviews/artist/title.md,
and the translated page goes to lxstens/content/lxstens/reviews/artist/title.md

3. add cover art

I just need to create a file at lxstens/static/album-covers/artist/title.jpg, and as long as it matches the name of the markdown page, it’ll get automatically converted into TINY WebP files (don’t worry, clicking the album art opens the original .jpg), and used in all places that need it.

compressing to WebP is actually really goated. it’s usually like less than 1% of the original file size, so they load really really really fast. (which matters, when theres a bunch of them)

4. build the site with Hugo

This gets automatically done when I push a commit by Cloudflare Pages (it’s free!!!), but I also do it locally first to make sure everything looks right. Hugo basically converts all of my simple markdown files into real HTML pages.

so, when you see the grid of album covers on the home page and their respective scores, that is all done automatically by Hugo. I never have to worry about the layout since I created my Hugo theme (out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)

Hugo is also awesome because it can calculate the scores for me based only on the shortcodes I showed in step 2. it also generates the table automatically!