Bug's blog

Woe is me. I utterly hate having my picture taken. Not really the best quality for a DJ, I know, but there it is.

Unfortunately, a recent amount of exposure has forced the inevitable, but it's good news for you, because now there are real pictures on the gallery page. Sorry, no more teasing about naked shots. I know you were all hoping for a miracle, but there won't be any nudie pics. So far there are only two pictures, but there will be more before the end of the year.

You can check back often or subscribe to the front page RSS, as I'll be updating the current news when I add new pics from events. So here we go, we're just getting started.

Stay tuned for more!

You might have noticed that the site looks a little differently. No, it's not your imagination. It got a complete overhaul. I felt I was getting proficient enough to make my site look a little better than the basic painful colors I had before. Anyway, here's what we came up with. It's a lot of dark, red, and transparency.

However, you might be seeing something near the top that resembles the old site, that doesn't fit at all. It just looks like an image slapped down without any thought as to how it looks, in a sort of retarded myspace style. Well look again. But, before you do, force a refresh. Hit shift while clicking the refresh button, to force your computer to download all the images again. Ah, there. That's better, isn't it? That image goes a lot better with the theme than the old one.

Anyway, the new look should hurt your eyes a little less. I know it hurts mine less. For anyone who is new, enjoy the new look and be extremely glad you weren't exposed to the old one. It wasn't fun, on any level.

I present to you, the new lovebugdj.com.

Go to the MIXES page. Download reDONKulous in OGG or AAC, or listen to it with the flash player or the Soundcloud player. For every track, refer back to the title. Repeat as necessary. Comment if you feel compelled to. You can also go HERE and comment. Because of the nature of the beast, there isn't going to be a track list just yet. It's better if you go into it blind. I also included something for the chiptunes fans. You'll know what it is when you hear it.

As always, and especially with this mix, a sense of humor is mandatory. Those without need not apply. That means those of you who find it impossible to laugh at silliness (yeah, you), don't bother with this one. You won't get it.

On a side note, for those interested in producing this style of donk, the unique drain pipe sound you hear in some of the tracks is made with a particularly stiff flip-flop (of the generic quality) and ranging diameters of PVC pipe. You should be able to find something similar at Wal-Mart. Hope that's enough to get you started.

I've decided to include AAC encoded versions of Shift and Improbability Drive on the Mixes page so that downloadable formats are compatible with everyone's favorite portable media playing product. They are a little bigger than the OGGs, but still about 3/4s the size of what the MP3 would be, while retaining the better sound quality.

The AAC files are wrapped in an m4a container, and although m4a isn't in the iPod specs, they seem to play fine on the iPod Touch that I tested them on.

So I don't want to hear any more complaining about iPods. No more excuses. Now you can take donk with you everywhere you go.

So the other day I found an awesome website called Soundcloud.com. Some of you may have heard of it already, but it's a music sharing site for artists and DJs. The object of the site is to give artists and DJs a way to distribute their tracks or mixes so that other people can hear what they have to offer. They have widgets for websites, as well as profile pages to point to, and they allow commenting and following of other artists. There's a bunch of other interactive stuff to do as well, but I'll let you check it out for yourself if you're interested.

The whole point of this is, the time comments allow me to track my mixes out. WHAT?!?! Track lists on LoveBug's mixes??? WHAT IS THIS NOISE???? It's true. I folded to demand and tracked them out. Improbability Drive is missing a couple (for obvious reasons), but the other ones are completely tracked out, front to finish. So far I've only done the ones that are in OGG. They re-compress everything to 128 for the widget player (although the download button links to the full track) so that they load faster, which makes the MP3 mixes sound like ass. The OGGs were originally 128, so it doesn't screw with them and they still sound pretty damn good. Again, OGG > MP3. You'll get the hang of this eventually. At a later date I may post the MP3 mixes up, which will make the difference obvious, but for now I've embedded the widget flash player for the top 4 mixes into their individual sections, and each player also has a fun wave form to look at while you're listening, so when you go about skipping through a mix, you can see where you're going, and since the tracks are marked on the wave form itself, you'll know where to click to hear that track.

I think everyone will like the visual enhancement to their audio experience. Go check them out, and comment in the mixes section to let me know what you think.

OH, speaking of comments. We've implemented a new captcha system that only demands a captcha if you sound like a bot or spam. I know it flags anything with code in it, but to the best of my knowledge comments won't support code, so if you're having a a captcha pop up for that, it's reminding you that we don't support code and you should probably get rid of it. I'm sure anything relating to "loving it hard" will also demand a captcha prompt so don't be too alarmed if you get one. It's a learning captcha system, so it's going to take a bit to figure out what to flag and what's not alarming in the least. The best thing to do is not to try and avoid it. It can't learn that way, so if you get one just feel good for contributing to betterment of the site. We can also flag stuff we think is inappropriate, so don't try to fool it because in the end there's a real person reading your comment and flagging the post manually. At the very least, try to be funny if you're going to go about wasting everyone's time (even yours) by trying to fool it. You had better make it good too, because I'm not even joking when I say I'll blacklist anyone who makes me waste part of my day flagging a post that fails to make me laugh.

At the end of the day, when all's said and done, time spent laughing is never a waste.

A: No.

For some reason, there is now a record linked on my djlist profile that's for sale on DanceRecords.com. It's apparently done by someone called Lovebug. I have no idea why it magically appeared on my djlist, but it isn't mine.

I've never produced my own tracks aside from mashups I've done for fun, NEVER released onto anything on vinyl, and never been signed to a record label.

Yeah, I suck. Sue me.

LoveBug is now on Twitter!!

http://twitter.thelovebugdj.com

That was easy.

So the logs tell me that the most common search string used in search engines resulting in website hits is "lovebug" (no DJ or anything). This intrigued me since "lovebug" by itself is extremely vague. There are a number of different things related to that word, this website being far less popular than say, Herbie the Love Bug, the insect informally known as a Lovebug, and of course, the Love Bug Virus. Previously, these were things Google turned up when I searched for lovebug.

But when I started seeing lovebug as being a popular search term, my curiosity was peaked. Surely thelovebugdj.com couldn't be too far down the list if a number of people were randomly hitting it. So I did a search on Google and found LoveBug near the end of the second page. WOW!!! Might not be too long until it's on the FIRST page!!! That was really exciting for me. That means that the term LoveBug by itself being linked to this site, and is being clicked more often (if I understand search engines right). Then LoveBug is being clicked in search results, making the link more popular, and pushing it up the list (I think). Anyway, it shows success of the website to be that high in the list under a popular search term, and that's really exciting for me.

I only searched in Google since that's my usual search engine choice as it's my home page, but you can try your favorite one and see how far down LoveBug is on yours. I'm going to open comments for this blog so that everyone can let me know what they find out.

Happy hunting!

Did you listen to Shift yet? I hope so, because the second mix in a week is released, and this one is what it's all about. Shifting to Improbability Drive, and this is where the fun really begins. Welcome to the future of LoveBug.

Download the ogg file or listen to it using the web based player on the mixes page.

This is donk. Know it. Love it. There's going to be a lot more where that came from.

Now presenting a new mix called Shift. It's the movement to another gear. Stay tuned to find out what gear that is. MORE TO COME!!!

You can download the OGG or listen to it now on the mixes page. But don't get too attached. This mix is only a glimpse of what's next. When the new one hits, it will be instantly forgotten. So shift with me, but the next gear is where you want to be. Make sure you shift all the way!