Album release has gone well, thanks everyone! Decent sales, lots of positive feedback. Still lots of work to do, which I am working on doing.

I rewrote the guts of the music submissions/you section and added all the new album tracks and source in there. Still haven’t added all the items I was sent from the new album release, but that’ll come soon.

Some stuff I need to blogs:

• There’s a Fake It remix contest coming up at Remix Fight.
• The Fake It cliche video thing has sailed past another deadline. Still trying to figure out how to drum up more submissions.
• I nominate this fellow as “happiest to receive my CDs”:

Yes!

I’ve been lazy with the blogging lately. Too busy, too boring. To make up for this I have put my latest Twitter status at the top of my blog now so you can know that I’m not dead if this is a concern of yours.

Twitter has been a pretty interesting service. Casual status contact with people I like is a nice addition to instant messaging. What would otherwise be a worthless bit of information is meaningful when it’s someone I care about.

That being said, I hate it when blogs that I subscribe to decide to cram their worthless twitters down my throat via RSS so I will not be doing that.

• I did an interview with the We Are Not Cool podcast the other week.
• I put a new theme on the Brad Sucks forums. They are now sexy as all get out thanks to Jazzman’s theme.
• I did a little visual makeover on Stripcreator.
• The mailing list wasn’t signing people up properly. Fixed.

Got myself a nice cold, heading to bed.

Whoah, I just happened into my Wordpress comment moderation queue and there were 500 and some messages in there, 60 of which were legit. I’ve now approved them, but that’s lame. My apologies to anyone I lazily silenced. Bad Wordpress!

Due to, uh, the Chinese, I’ve had to put a little thang in place to block multiple mp3 downloads from the same IP. For some reason certain IPs (and most of them Chinese) would suddenly swamp my server for no reason grabbing every mp3 at the same time, ruining everything for everyone.

So anyway, if you have trouble with the limits please let me know.

I’m just about ready to give up reading Digg and it’s not due to the latest “democracy” controversy. It’s because I’m totally tired of reading stories about Digg. So tired.

Also I’ve moved bradsucks.net to a new server. Hopefully this one won’t crash all the time.

I’ve put the del.icio.us playtagger on most pages on this site that have MP3s. Like the music page and the remix album as well as the other albums. So if you have Flash installed you should see a little play icon next to the MP3 links that will let you stream the song. I think it’s too handy to not use when it’s so easy to implement. My complaints:

1. I have to include a script off of the del.icio.us server. So if they go down (which they’ve been prone to lately), my playing goes down. Hopefully it won’t freeze and choke my site during the Javascript include.

(more…)

I’m having a few issues upgrading to Wordpress 2.0 due to all the crazy hacks I put in, so things may be a little freaky around here until I get that stuff resolved.

So until Scoble posted about a boycott I had no idea that the issue of excerpts versus full text in feeds was so huge. I’ve been using RSS aggregators for a couple of years now and have always preferred headings and decent excerpts. I’ve unsubscribed from more feeds for having too much text than I have too little.

I don’t really want to switch my main feeds for that reason, but I’ve made a full text feed here for the people who want it:

http://www.bradsucks.net/rss2/fulltext/

I have no plans to add RSS ads because I think they’re dumb and gross.

Also for any Wordpress hackers out there looking to do this on their own blogs, I’ve described what I did to make this work here.

Slightly rearranged site design is online now. The blog is now here. Please update your links for uninterrupted Brad service.

In the site design there were a few goals:

• Reduce sidebar clutter. I’m down to one now and working through it in therapy with the love and support of my family.
• Move the weblog to a /blog/ page, to make the site a bit less crazy for new people.
• Break up the news and weblog so I don’t feel like I’m burying the news whenever I blog.

The front page is just a placeholder right now and will have a static, more traditional band design in the future once I have something worth featuring there.

There’s now a Flash player on the right sidebar under my album for a quick listen. I’m not usually a big fan of Flash, but in this instance I think it’s way more convenient than having MP3 links. You can still get the MP3s on the album or music pages of course. Let me know if you have any feedback.