Crucial Tracks: Help & FAQs

<- Back to the app

First, the backstory. Why I built the Crucial Tracks app and some of the decisions that were made:

Crucial Tracks, the app
Announcing the Crucial Tracks app – a music journal to share the songs that made you.
Crucial TracksJason

FAQs

I just created an account, what should I do first?

First off, head over to your profile settings page and set up your profile. You will want to add a bio, avatar, and set your username – this will enable your public profile page. You can also set your Mastodon profile, Bluesky profile, and add a link to your blog or homepage. Any other preferences we add will be here too, like the ability to default all new entries to Public.

Once that is complete, just start writing! You can write about any song you want or use the daily prompt as a starting point. The site will limit you to one post per calendar day, but you can also go back in time and add entries to days in the past. (That's not required though!)

What is markdown?

Markdown is a special syntax you can use to format text. It allows you to add things like bold, emphasis, links, blockquotes and more without knowing HTML.

See this guide for all of the options

What is RSS?

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is the backbone of much of the internet. When you subscribe to a podcast, for example, it's really an RSS feed that connects the podcast publisher to the app or service you are using. The same principle applies for text content too: just swap out "podcasts" for news articles, blog posts, photo feeds, etc. – you just need a reader application to subscribe to these feeds and ultimately read them in one location.

I do all of my news and social media (Mastodon, Bluesky, YouTube, and micro.blog) through an RSS app (Reeder, see link below). I highly recommend this method as you escape from algorithms, ads and pop-ups, shitty comment sections, and much more. It's liberating and reduces anxiety.

Recommendations

RSS services
(These services handle the subscriptions and viewing in a web browser. Many reader apps allow connections to these services, so you can read in a mobile app of your choice.)

RSS apps
(These can connect to a service above or you can manage your subscriptions locally in the app.)

  • Reeder (iOS/Mac - can do RSS content, podcasts, and social media in one app)
  • Tapestry (iOS only currently - similar idea as Reeder)
  • Unread (iOS/Mac)
  • Capy Reader (Android)

Apps you can do automated things with RSS feeds

These services allow you to send RSS feed entries to other location, like sharing a post automatically to social media.

  • Echofeed - focused on social media sharing mainly. Free for a single feed/destination combo (echo), $25 per year for unlimited
  • IFTTT - you can create “recipes” that involve a crazy number of available services. Free for 2 “recipes”, plans starting at $2.50/month for more.
  • Micro.blog - this service will not only get you a blog and non-anxiety inducing social network, but it has a robust cross posting service that handles RSS feeds from other sources. This allows you to automatically post these feeds to your blog and share to mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and other sites. Plans starting at $1 per month, but the $5 plan is where you will want to be.

Can you add...?

If it's Spotify or anything Google/Meta/Elon Musk the answer is a hard no.

Otherwise, I'll consider most anything that fits the site purpose. 😄

More coming soon!