I’ve added a new feature to the blog — email updates. Just enter your address in the form near the top of the right sidebar and you’ll automagically get an email whenever a new item is posted to this blog. Emails are sent only once a day, and only if there’s something new. Try it out, won’t you?

WordPress, the program I use to write this blog, has an excellent spam filter called Akismet. And it’s a good thing, as the spambots attempt to post hundreds of messages to this blog each week. The problem is that occasionally there are false positives and a legitimate message gets banished to the ether. While Akismet saves all the tagged-as-spam comments, allowing me to review and de-spam them, it’s a royal pain in the neck to wade through the muck every few days searching (hoping?) for that one legitimate post.

So, I’ve installed one o’ them CAPTCHA thingies. That’s the doohickey where you have to type in a random word before your comment is submitted. I know that some poeple find them to be a pain in the arse, but I’ve tried to minimize the pain by choosing a “fun” set of possible words.

The one really annoying thing about this change is that if you enter the word incorrectly, you will probably lose your post and will have to retype the whole thing. I’m working on figuring out a way to fix that.

I just made a couple of changes to the Lothars website:

1. I added our SNOCAP widget (kindly provided at no cost by CD Baby) to a new “Digital Download Store” page in the Merch section. I put our iTunes Store links on the same page.
2. I noticed some formatting problems when viewing the Lothars site with IE7. I fixed them, I think, but did so in a rather ugly manner. I’m going to need to do a bit of research to create a more elegant fix.

Introducing my first attempt at updating this blog’s look to more closely match that of the Lothars website. Let me know if anything looks really weird (or just plain bad) to you.

I’ve also thrown in some affiliate links to theremin dealers, as well as some Google ads, in the vain hope that people will actually click on them and help make this place something less than a 100% labor of love (wait… that didn’t come out right…).

This just added to the Gigs sections of the Lothars website:

On April 29, The Lothars return for their annual visit to local Somerville haunt P.A.’s Lounge. This time around, we are opening for Alasehir, a side project of Bardo Pond brothers John and Michael Gibbons with drummer Michael Zangha. Also on the bill are D.C. psych improvisors Kohoutek.

While procrastinating a write-up of my experiences in Los Angeles this past week, I took the time to add two songs to the Lothars Jukebox.

The first is an outtake from the Metallic Sonatas sessions that appeared on a 2003 compilation called Grain from the dotdotdot label out of Ireland. Subtitled “a compilation of 99 short tracks,” we were number 86.
The second is a cover version of The Call Up, written and originally recorded by The Clash. It’ll be released on May Day this year via a double CD tribute to Sandinista!, that also includes contributions by Jon Langford, Camper Van Beethoven, Wreckless Eric, Amy Rigby and Steve Wynn. We are in strange, but flattering, company. You can read more about The Sandinista! Project here.

I do intend to give this blog, or at least the Lothars section, the same look-and-feel as the main Lothars Web Site, but I thought it more important to get this thing up and running. Until then, you’ll just have to suffer under the default WordPress template.

• New look and feel
• Streaming Jukebox
• New & improved shopping cart system
• Videos
• And much much more

Check it out!