Sockpuppet website updates!

I finally got a bunch of stuff working on the new Sockpuppet website, including the music browser. Now people will have the ability to actually find something in my vast sea of content!

I still need to finish tagging a bunch of stuff to make it useful but having the functionality in place gives me motivation to do so.

I’ve also improved the “buy box” and added way more streaming providers to the sources (which of course requires more content to be filled out, too), and there’s a bunch of other functionality like being able to browse lyrics and song notes and such from album pages.

The really neat thing is that most of this stuff, even the dynamic stuff, is done using pure CSS! There’s a little bit of Javascript for a couple of things but I have some ideas about how I can remove that stuff, and it’s not like the javascript is particularly heavyweight anyway.

At some point I should release the templates as Publ samples, so that others can use this as a basis for building their own music sites too. Or something. I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s really taking advantage of Publ functionality under the hood.

Anyway, for those who follow me via a feed reader but haven’t added that site yet, it’s definitely ready to be added at this point, and I’ll be posting most of my music-related blogging over there from now on.

New music site!

Over the past few days I’ve been pushing myself to finally get a usable new music site and it’s finally at the point where I’m ready to have the tires kicked. There’s a bunch of stuff that needs to still be done on it but that can come later. For now it at least has vague parity with my Bandcamp page, and my wrists need a rest.

Moving away from Bandcamp

For quite some time I’ve had my music site hosted by Bandcamp, since it was a pretty low-friction way to get my discography up and online, albeit with some annoying limitations. Previously I had the main domain host a “micro-site” for whatever my most recent release was and then used a subdomain for the actual Bandcamp page, but updating that got to be obnoxious and nobody really cared about the microsite thing anyway.

There’s a bunch of reasons, though, why I’m going to go back to running my own site, and hopefully downplaying Bandcamp as My Main Music Presence online. Here’s some of the reasons.

Read more…

“Instrumental” album release party

Hey y'all, since I have the album coming out on Monday, I figure Sunday night would be a good time to actually try out Bandcamp’s “listening party” biz. It’s Sunday, March 31 at 5:30 PM PDT (GMT-0700).

Also I’ll be attending a music listening party on VRChat tomorrow night (March 30) at 6:30 PM PDT (GMT-0700) and hopefully my album will be one of the things that gets played there too! The easiest way to join that would be to send me an invite request; here’s my VRChat profile if we aren’t friends already. (Unfortunately searching for my username from within VRChat is pretty difficult but you could try pasting this: fluffy — note the funky unicode!)

Lo-Fi Beats at a New Lo-Fi Price

My album crowdfunding project was going a bit more slowly than I’d hoped, but thanks to the Qrates support team we were able to come up with better pricing, and now it’s only $29.50 a copy.

Unfortunately, Qrates is unable to simply lower the price of an album, they had to cancel all of the existing preorders, so if you were hoping to buy a copy, you'l need to redo your preorder… but on the plus side now the price is much, much lower, for the same great double-length album!

I hope this makes it easier for folks to join me on this lo-fi coffee journey.

Thanks!