Rearviewmirror April 3, 2020

Hey kids. This blogpost is brought to you by my cassette copy of Pearl Jam’s Vs., because my old stereo fucking exploded (seriously, burnt plastic smell and all) and this new one has a tape player in it. Didn’t see any blown fuses or caps or anything when I opened it up, and it still technically works, but the speakers buzz now, so something’s not grounded in there. I don’t trust it.

After Tesserae got finished, my sights got set on overhauling the big one: the top-level somnolescent.net site. Each of the last designs have quite literally been something I’ve cobbled together. There wasn’t much group input outside of the buttons to each site, and really, not much content to speak of aside from the manifesto. We’re so vibrant as a collective, and the top-level site should reflect that. Art should be involved. In-jokes should be involved. No links to Somnol’s growing network of subsites, stuff like Tesserae? Absurd.

For a few months now, Caby and I have wanted to design a new, proper top-level site that everyone in the group has input on, and now that we’re actually building it, we’ve got a pretty similar setup to Districts going: I handle the site building, Caby does graphics, and everyone else does the graphics for their site, some Somnolian-specific text on the profile page, and gives their okay otherwise. Of course, AutoSite built too, so in a way, dcb is still handling tech.

This won’t be done in time for the next recap in a day or two, but that’s alright, because it’ll likely be a full recap on its own. Seriously, we’re folding in a lot of features it should’ve had from the get go, some of which I even wanted at the time but never added because someone shot the idea down (Neo’s “I don’t want a Somnol contact book” comment over the about page comes to mind) or God knows what else.

And thankfully, work is progressing really nicely. Have a peek.

I’ll have more to say about the details when it’s all settled. And boy, do I have a lot to say.

Tags: somnolescent.net, Web Design,