Xerol's Homepage/Blog

Today I'm implementing some of the long-planned features of hDot. First off you'll notice the vastly changed front page. This is the first step to allowing paid accounts.

The "my profile" block on the right now shows your daily bandwidth usage. All current accounts start with a 100MB daily quota, which goes up by 100KB every time someone views a page on the account. Hotlinked images and all file downloads will use up the quota. This is to bring more traffic into the site. Basically you'll have two options if you're a high-bandwidth user - Use hotlinked thumbnails to bring traffic in, or purchase additional quota.

The quota increase is permanent, and after a couple of weeks will be reduced to an amount based on your account level. Basically if you bring a lot of traffic into the site one time, you'll have a better bandwidth cushion for life.

Once all these features are implemented I'll be rolling out a paypal system for purchasing storage and bandwidth. Read on for an overview of available plans.

I wonder what could be inside?

Update 1/22: Proof arrived, (see http://xerol.org/h/news/94) but the disc color printed wrong. If it's something that can be easily mitigated, it'll be another week or so for another proof, otherwise we'll just go live on Tuesday.

Update 1/16: Proof is en route as of Friday, after I receive it we'll be good to go for sales. I estimate 7-10 business days.

Update 1/14: I've updated the album page with 30-second previews of all tracks.

UnSynth is officially going on sale in a couple weeks, both as a CD purchase and digital download. The post-release CD will sell for $12.99, but you can pre-order it now for only $9.99 + shipping. In addition, all pre-orders come autographed, thereby satisfying one of the 5 achievements.

I'm not exactly sure when the album will become available for purchase, so I'm leaving the pre-order open for one month from today, that is until February 13, 2010. Even if the album comes out before then you'll still be able to order directly through paypal at the discounted price. Pre-orders should ship within a week of the actual release date.

Here's a preview track - Track 6: Gravity Reactor.

Click below to begin pre-order purchase

So far I've uploaded album5 and Wasted Space Redux, which are still available for free, but if you enjoy my music and want to give me an early Christmas present, they're now available on Amazon MP3.

UnSynth will only completely be available for purchase, the page will have previews of all tracks and full downloads of a couple. Right now I've finished 12 of 24 tracks and have another 8 somewhat far along, so I'm optimistically setting a March 16, 2010 release date.

Explanation on page.

I've added a new feature to the sidebar, daily toplists. These reset at whatever midnight server time is until I can figure out a way to do a rolling 24 hour block without taking up 4 billion rows of database space.

Note: The links at the top of the sections point to pages I haven't written yet. I'm working on a revamped listing system which will integrate searches, clean URLs, and filtering. This may take a few days.

I'm temporarily disabling news comments due to a spam leak. Should get them back up by the next time I post news.

Didn't get to play much in the last month but went deep in a couple PLO tourneys on Cake to make it an up month. Graphs after the jump.

Over the last few weeks I've been having issues on the OCR server, which aren't present on other servers nor experienced by anyone else on the server.