Hello again!
If you're reading this, first I want to say thank you for still being here! There was a real possibility that I would launch the site and it would just be dead on arrival, and it's been so exciting to see people submitting stuff for review, writing reviews, and chatting away on the Discord.
It's been a fun couple of weeks, and I've still been busy making tweaks to the site.
One of those changes is setting up a Bluesky account where all reviews will automatically be posted. For those who don't use the platform, it has a very active DIY music community and so my hope is that by posting the reviews, and appropriately hashtagging them, it can be a decent way of helping people find this site.
In other news, you may have noticed that the homepage has changed a little. I wasn't happy with the way album reviews and track reviews were separated on the desktop version of the site, and it also caused a weird issue where all the track reviews would bunch up at the bottom of the page on mobile, so I've now put them together in one list. On desktop, I've moved the blog posts to the right hand column where the track reviews go, where on mobile it stays at the top where it was before (although only showing two articles where the desktop version shows four).
I've also added a From the archive section, which will pull 12 random old reviews that otherwise don't show on the homepage anymore. It felt kinda bad to me that once a review is pushed off the homepage, it kind of gets forgotten about, and so I wanted a way to make sure that those reviews can still stay fresh. They should refresh roughly every 10 minutes.
There's been a few other small changes too which I'll list here:
- On-site notifications
- A listing page for artists that have been reviewed
- A listing page for writers that have written reviews
- The ability to add pronouns to your profile
There are still lots of things I intend to do in the future. There have been some issues with the email password system for some users and I think the provider I've been using, although cheap, has been a bit flaky. I also still would like it to be easier for users to discover new music that suits there taste, and I'd like to have a way for people to bookmark reviews they like and maybe share them, too.
As mentioned before, it's only me working on this site, so things take time and might break from time to time, but I really appreciate everyone who's stuck with it, and especially those who have either written reviews or shared the site with other people, you're all legends!
Have a great day! Thomas x