using fingertips

Using Fingertips

Fingertips is designed to be easy and fun to use. This means relatively clean-looking pages--just text and links, perhaps a picture here and there, but no fancy bells and whistles. It also means that some things will be easy to find while other things are here to be discovered as you look around. I notice that some people consider this "difficult to navigate." I consider it fun. Life's too short to spend so much time saving time.

The primary goal here is to provide you with links to good songs you can download from the web. Fingertips only deals with songs you can download legally, for free, so you can put them on your own iPods or burn them onto your own CDs. If you want to read a more extended explanation of why Fingertips exists, do be sure to visit the Introduction page if you haven't already.

Okay so notice there in the last paragraph, the text in green, without calling a lot of attention to itself, offers a link for an extra bit of explanation or clarification. That'll happen here and there on Fingertips.

Okay, on to getting around here. The home page has a constellation of phrases distributed through the colored boxes; each phrase is a link to one of the site's main features. The more prominently displayed the phrase, the larger and more important the feature.

You might notice, therefore, that the words in the central, yellow box seem to be the easiest to read and notice. These represent the core features of Fingertips, listed here:

* This Week's Finds
                                                     > > about this page

*    Select Artist Guide
                                                     > > about this page

*    Music Site Guide
                                                     > > about this page

* Fingertips Top 10
                                                     > > about this page

Click on the names to go to these pages or, logically enough, click on the words "about this page" to read about each page. The "about this page" link is also available at the top of just about every content page on Fingertips.

There are a few other home page links worth knowing about here on Fingertips. Most useful may be the Master Artist List. This is a list of all bands and musicians mentioned anywhere on Fingertips, with a link to the place where they're listed. The Master Artist List is worth a glance if you want a quick, overall sense of the music Fingertips is covering at any given point.

Another home page link will take you to the Podcasts page. Fingertips podcasts tend to go online once every three weeks; the page will tell you everything you need to know about that. Yet another home page link takes you to a page of CD reviews, which I try to update about once a month. Because Fingertips only features music I like, the CD review section, otherwise known as the Album Bin, only features CDs I wholeheartedly recommend. This is more from the Life's Too Short Department--life's too short to spend a lot of time slamming music you don't like. I also only review CDs that offer at least one song as a free and legal MP3.

If you become a regular visitor to Fingertips, you might also want to be aware of the phrase latest site additions which appears in the green box directly below the box with the Fingertips logo. Click this and you'll be brought to a page listing all the things that have been added to the site during the last 10 days.
You may also be interested ultimately in checking out some of the secondary features of the site, which are listed in the last, purple-ish colored box on the home page. These include a page listing some resources for full-length album streams I've come across online, a list of notable musicians who keep interesting blogs, a list of blogs that link to Fingertips, and a few other odds and ends. Oh, and don't miss the search box at the bottom of the home page, if you prefer browsing via search. By the way, when you see the Fingertips "hand print" at the bottom of a page, it will take you back to the main page. Likewise will the Fingertips logo at the top of each page take you back to the main page. I'm assuming that you know to use the "back page" arrows on your browser when you simply want to return to the page you were before you clicked on something.