Now that it’s 2026, it’s time to make a few changes to the blog.  One of those overdue changes comes to the long-running weekly feature Open Mic Adventures.

According to a hasty review of my records, I ceased playing open mics—and, indeed, most live gigs outside of private bookings—in 2025.  I simply lacked the time and energy—and interest.  I much prefer rehearsing my students so they can play live.

That’s been one of the big changes in my life in recent years.  I enjoy playing live, but as I get older, going to open mic nights and playing songs I wrote a decade (or more) ago lost its luster.  It’s also amazing how once I got engaged (and now married), my desire to show off in coffee shops plummeted.  If I’m going to play to impress anyone—always a dubious proposition—it’s going to be for Dr. Wife.

That’s all to say that I’m not ending Open Mic Adventures, per se—there’s always that chance I’ll get that itch to play and get some good video in the process—but that I’m shifting it into something more accurate:  New Music Tuesday.  The “Open Mic” appellation ceased to be accurate for most of 2025, as I featured more and more of my original electronic compositions.

Of course, good ol’ WordPress.com makes it easy to put together these weekly, multimedia posts.  One thing I’ve come to love about WordPress.com is how intuitive it is to upload all sorts of media.

For example, here is today’s featured track, “Herald,” uploaded as a beautifully lossless WAV file using the “Audio” block:

I found this brief piece scribbled on a red tardy slip I had in my desk. I apparently wrote it down on 8 August 2023, and finally put it into my music composition software this morning.  It’s a very simple, quick piece, indicative of the kinds of etudes I was composing at that time.  As such, “Herald” is a brief piano fanfare, suitable for players at most levels.

As always, here’s a quick YouTube video of the piece, featuring the original manuscript and a more colorful version I put together; again, WordPress.com makes it super easy to embed videos directly from YouTube:

While I do like embedding because it saves some storage space, my WordPress.com Premium plan—just eight bucks a month!—comes with loads of storage space (13 GB, I believe), so I can indulge (especially with this shorter video) and upload it directly to this post:

As I did with Open Mic Adventures, I’m including original and edited manuscripts of the pieces I compose.  Here is the aforementioned red tardy slip composition:

And here is the more colorful finished manuscript.  I like the way the yellow offsets against the black and white of the score:

Again, I’ve been really pleased with the functionality of WordPress.com, which also comes with Jetpack built in.  Jetpack has functionality I’ve only begun to explore, and I look forward to seeing what else it offers in 2026 as I continue to reconfigure the blog.

That said, I love its Akismet anti-spam system.  For some reason, I have been getting huge amounts of traffic from China lately.  While I’d love to believe that my Chinese students are sharing my posts with all their friends and family back home, I suspect it’s more a matter of some AI scraping my site for data.  According to Akismet, it’s blocked 13,772 spam comments in the past six months alone—and 141,319 over the long life of this blog.

Planning a wedding and buying a house last year meant I had to put some attentiveness to the blog on the backburner.  There’s no way I could have fielded that many spam comments.

Here’s my point—besides the music featured in this post—as a musician, writer, and composer, WordPress.com has really been a Godsend.  I switched the blog over to WordPress.com back in 2018, and I’ve never looked back.  The ability to create a post like this one—oozing with video and music and images—and do it in about twenty minutes is incredible.

Is it always perfect?  No.  Does it make it possible to share my music and my passions with lots of people?  Absolutely.

I know several of my readers could make excellent blogs with WordPress.com if they chose to do so.  And I think it’s the perfect platform for featuring music.  Musicians are sometimes overly reliant on social media platforms, and while those are useful, there’s still no substitute for a dedicated website with excellent hosting and storage.

It’s the new year; there’s never been a better time to start a blog of your own!  WordPress.com is the place to do it.

If you start a blog with WordPress.com, let me know!

In the meantime—Happy Listening!

—TPP

WordPress.com: Unlimited growth, one flat price