This site is now Gravatar enabled, so all y’all can have your cute lil’ picture next to your cute lil’ comment wherever you go. Go get yours now, it’s soooo easy! And feel free post a comment to try it out.
(If any of you OLDtimers need a copy of your OLD icon from the OLD days of my OLD site, gimme a holler. I still have ‘em.)
I’ve changed blogging platforms, from the very great and unimpeachable ExpressionEngine to the also-great and more popular (probably because it’s free) WordPress. Some things are broken at the moment, like the old RSS feeds. And there are some features missing that are probably going to stay missing, like the old membership system. I’ll get the links working again soon at any rate. Well, hope you like it! I sure am having fun playing with it. I’m going to start including daily Twitter digests in my blog so it won’t be so quiet around here. (And you can post comments to them as well, unlike on Twitter.) Anyone can comment, and once you get a comment approved you’ll be unmoderated from there on out. (Provided you behave yourself. ;-)
Okay, so… here’s the deal y’all. The phrase "scintillating scotoma" is now outranking my own damn name in Google search queries leading to this site. Which means migraine auras are more famous than I am, and we ABSOLUTELY can’t have that, can we? Just kidding. It’s not a bad thing, it just means our little group has grown to magnificent proportions, so much so that it’s probably outgrown its living quarters. Time to give it a home of its own. So… I hope this isn’t totally lame of me, but please say hello to the new Google Group I just created, with the brilliant and original name "Scintillating Scotoma"! http://groups.google.com/group/scintillating-scotoma
It’s totally empty right now. But once I get my shit together, I’ll post an archive of this site’s SS-related entries and comments to a page in that group, for easy reference. I won’t post any of y’all’s e-mail addresses, don’t worry, just the comments themselves. And if anybody doesn’t want their old comment appearing over there, just let me know and I’ll get rid of it, no prob.
It’s been deeply interesting for me to host this group over the years, and I fully intend to keep it going, just not so much *here*. I hope y’all understand… ::sniff::
In the last post I talked a little about how we now have RSS* comments feeds on a per-post basis. All but useless to anybody who doesn’t follow that one particular thread of mine that gets all the comments!! So here’s something for the rest of y’all. A sitewide comments feed. It’s a master list of the most recent fifty comments, as they come in, no matter where they show up on this site. Just like the "Recent comments…" thingy on my front page, but in RSS form, and with full comments instead of snippets.
So yeah, at this point I have almost 3000 potential feeds being served up here, I shit you not. Three normal feeds, a comments feed, and one for each of the 2800-someodd blog entries. Can I think up a few more? I bet I will!
(Oh, dude… don’t tell me your life has yet to be transformed by the power of syndication! Read this.)
My friends The Zincs are releasing a great new album next month on Thrill Jockey Records, called Black Pompadour. I sang backups on three songs, so I’ve added it to my guest appearances list. It’ll automagically pop up on the front page come release day (Tuesday March 20th).
I’ve finished consolidating a bunch of my tour pictures on a Flickr set, and will gradually be adding them here on the blog as well. It’s stuff I took with my crappy digital camera and my (even crappier) cellphone camera. Try viewing it as a slideshow!
Thanks so much for kicking my ass Duffy!! I’ve uploaded my three old videos to Archive.org so they’ll no longer be sucking up all my damn bandwidth. While I was at it I made a new category for them here in the blog — they were formerly housed on a separate static page, which I’m pretty sure was the last vestige of my ancient pre-blogging-tool website, circa 1997 or some shit. I wasn’t totally sure of the exact dates the videos were finished but they’re more or less in the right ballpark.
Working on getting the mp3s up there as well, but I gotta go to bed now, I’m pooped. That was a buttload of work! But sooo worth it. I’m getting so much traffic these days what with the touring and all, I’m hoping this will help stave off any unfortunate overages this month with my webhost.
So go giddum! No skin off my nose. :-)
Jeez I haven’t blogged in a week!! Pretty crazy around here getting ready for the tour. Lots to talk about but my mind is going blank right now, and I have to bolt anyway. So I’ll just let y’all know that I’m paid up with my webhost for the overtraffic in January… I un-hid the MP3 and video folders but don’t go too crazy y’all. Well I mean, don’t worry, it was never my *readers* that caused a problem, just BOTS, plus that one high-traffic blogger who linked straight to my bigass video files. My htaccess file doesn’t allow for remote hotlinking (i.e., showing my videos on somebody else’s page) but this was just normal linking and I don’t know how to prevent that. There must be a way to use htaccess to disallow regular links to multimedia files (as opposed to html or php files) but it’s been so long since I studied that shit, I don’t know. No time to do my damn homework either.
Just upgraded to a SWEET new beta version of ExpressionEngine which includes a brand new image gallery module. I’ll be playing with that over the next few days. If you notice any weirdnesses, lick my… er… I mean… let me know.
The first confirmations are coming in for the tour I’m doing with Manishevitz in November / December… please to be viewing and clicking on the sidebar to your right for more info. More dates will be coming soonish. First person to ask me why I’m not playing in their town is a rotten egg! :-P
I’ve been meaning to put up a sort of a FAQ for quite awhile, so instead of putting it on one page I turned into a whole category. If y’all can think of any good questions to use, post a comment here and maybe I’ll include ‘em.
Don’t be alarmed if things keep flipping around in here… I finally figured out how to get the upcoming-shows entries to only appear in the shows section so they’re no longer cluttering up the front page and confusing everyone. Do let me know if anything really weird happens (broken links, etc) — I’m just fixing stuff as I run across these funkinesses but I’m sure there are lots I haven’t seen yet. God, this site is such a beast!!! I love it but I hate it, ha ha.
I just entered in a handful of journal pages I wrote in the summer of 1991. Lotta complaining about work and stuff. To read ‘em, I guess just start here and work your way forward about twelve pages. This particular journal peters out at that point, but oh well, at least I got what I did. It gives you a pretty good picture of where my head was at at the time.
For that journal I was writing on Xerox’ed pages… the opposite sides of the sheets all have cool clip-art, most of which I got from the Wall Street Journal (which arrived daily for my bosses at the time). I would use the company Xerox to blow up the images to 8-1/2 x 11, and write on the back. This was important work-related stuff! ;-)
I just turned on my Windows PC for the first time in weeks and weeks. Pulled up my homepage so I could check out how my new EE layout looks in the big monitor. And oh god… it hurts, make them turn it off mommy!! It’s all purple and lavender. It is totally gay!! On the iBook the background is a straight-up powder blue and the borders are a little darker, but nothing’s all purple like that. I wonder if it’s just my monitor or if it’s really a PC thing. Blecch.
I’m scanning bits of my handwriting to get some personalization goin’ on in my site. Do you like it so far, with the page header? I know, it’s a web-cliché to use handwriting but… I have a giant ego! And I happen to like the way I write, so there. ;-)
I’m gonna try harder to keep up with my Now Playing list.* Just cleaned up the handful of entries I already had, so I can at least get a consistent format happenin’. I do have a few archived copies of the ancient "What’s on my turntable" page, but I never used to put dates on those, what a shame! It really was very blog-like. I would keep fifty entries on a page and just rotate the list whenever I played something new. Maybe I can just fudge and put up a few snapshots of the old pages, based on the dates they were archived?
* UPDATE: Once I started using Audioscrobbler/Last.fm, I more or less abandoned the concept of a hand-edited Now Playing list. I hadn’t made that many entries to warrant a full category, so I just folded them into the Featured Links list.
