Posts tagged sitenews
Out of It updates

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:



Twitter status

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.

Comment moderation

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!

Brad Turcottesitenews
MP3 limits

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.

Brad Turcottesitenews

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 to a new server. Hopefully this one won't crash all the time.

Brad Turcottemisc, rant, sitenews
playtagger again

I've put the 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 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.

2. I have no control over the look of the play button. Not that I'm artistically gifted enough to do much with it, but it'd be nice.

3. It's messier than it needs to be when you hit play because it rams a "tag this" link in there. I understand there's no reason for to provide this app if they're not getting something out of it, but it's ugly and probably just confusing to any non-nerd visitors I might have. Also it tends to make the page jump around when it expands and contracts.

4. It may create a bandwidth apocalypse. Streaming and direct linking and so on is scary business. I like that people can bookmark my songs and stream them off, but the bandwidth implications frighten me. But I guess we'll see what happens.

So while it's a pretty cool tool, I'd jump ship to a version I could host and customize a bit better in a hot second.

Brad Turcottegear, sitenews

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.

Brad Turcottesitenews
Full text RSS feed

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:

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.

Updated site design

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.

Wordpress active

It's taken forever and a half, but this weblog seems to be switched to Wordpress now. Huge thanks to Denise for CSS help. There are probably broken things all over the site. If you spot any please let me know. Right now I'm just thankful it's gotten this far.

Also: might be worth updating your RSS URLs. I have forwards in right now but one of the two RSS readers I tried choked on it.

Slight Redesign

I revised this humble weblog a bunch. Things should hopefully be a little easier to navigate and a little tiny bit prettier. There are probably broken and unfinished things kicking around, feel free to point them out, I'll get to them as soon as I can. I gave up on CSS for layout because it's a total pain in the ass. I couldn't get it to do what I wanted in any of the browsers despite the finest minds in the world working 24 hours non-stop on my dumb border problems, so I'm not buying that it's Internet Explorer's fault.

Anyhow, back to trying to be a musician again.


I've been working on a very slight redesign and thorough rewrite of this website. I pretty much want to kick whoever invented CSS in the nuts.

Atom feed

There's now an Atom feed for this site. It's like RSS only DIFFERENT! If you don't know what any of that junk is, go try out Bloglines or FeedDemon or something. I've been trying out FeedDemon and so far I love it.


Apparently AOL is blocking mail from my ISP (Allstream). I just started getting notices about this the other day but have been suspicious for a while. So if you didn't get a reply from me and are on AOL, that may be why (the other option is that I'm lazy but I've been pretty good about email lately). If you've been trying to get in touch with me, please send me another email and I'll use a different mail server to reply. Thanks.


Finally got around to tidying the web design here up a bit. Let me know if there's anything I goofed on.


I've hastily put together a gallery finally. It has some art and things that nice folks have sent in. If anyone has anything to add, it would be awesome of you to send it in.


So apparently Outside the Inbox is popular. The server seems to be holding up OK right now, but the traffic is flooding in and I'd like to have a contingency plan. If anyone's got bandwidth they want to offer up for mirrors (or maybe a BitTorrent or something?), please contact me. Thanks so much!