Journal
Rebuilding the website
More than a year of evenings, weekends and starting again. A personal note on rebuilding the website and everything that went into it.
Read the article
I’ve said this website was nearly ready quite a few times. Publicly, privately, to myself. I meant it every time. Then I would use a page properly, find something I couldn’t leave as it was and disappear into it again. Or spend ages changing something, look at it later and realise the version I had already thrown out was better. There has been a lot of making, undoing and starting again. For more than a year, most of it happened after the work I do for a living. Evenings, weekends, whatever time I could find. Anyway, you can finally have a proper look around. I wanted to write some of this down while it’s still fresh, because calling it a website update doesn’t explain much of what went into it.
I can’t give you a useful number of hours. There were sleepless nights and plenty of evenings when I should have put the whole thing away earlier. Time with family and friends, time for myself, places I didn’t go, things I left unfinished or forgot about. I had health problems during this time too. I don’t feel like going into all of that here, but it would be dishonest to write about this as if I had simply found a spare hour every evening and used it well. Sometimes I managed to fit it around life. Sometimes I let it take too much. I kept thinking there would be more room for everything else once this next part was finished. Then there was another part. I chose to do this, and I still want to do it. I can be pleased with what I’ve made and admit that I’m tired too.
Closing the computer didn’t always mean stopping. I would still be thinking about how something should work, whether a change had broken another page, what I needed to check next. I could be trying to finish a text or answer an artist and still have all of that going around in my head. And when you’ve told people you’re nearly ready, having to explain that you’re still working on the same thing gets embarrassing. I was getting impatient with myself as well. Sometimes I was fixing a real problem. Sometimes I had looked at it for so long that I needed to leave it alone and couldn’t quite make myself do that. That has been part of learning how to finish this, too.
The journal takes up a strange amount of space in my life. A finished publication might have my name under the words, but around it there is the correspondence, editing, artwork, uploading, coding, promotion, paying for things and keeping the whole place running. I do that work myself now, alongside the job that pays my bills. There were people who contributed a lot at different points, and I’m grateful for what they brought to it. Keeping those contributions alive has become part of my work as well. When someone arrives, presses Play and stays for a while, they shouldn’t have to think about any of this. I’d rather they were thinking about what they’re hearing.
01Keeping the place recognisable
One of the hardest decisions was how much I could change before it stopped feeling like the same place. I wanted to keep the black and white, the roughness, the feeling of going through an archive. Those things are very close to me. At the same time, there was no point preserving every inconvenience just because it had been there for years. The writing had to become easier to read. The site had to work comfortably on a phone. I spent a lot of time looking at type, spacing, proportions, photographs and covers. You can stare at two versions for so long that you lose any idea of which one is better. Then you open them the next morning and immediately see what was bothering you. That happened quite a lot.
Then there was the archive itself. The journal started in 2010, and the mix series in 2011. Over those years the material had been made in different formats, by different people, on different versions of the website. Mixes, interviews, reviews, photographs, tracklists, little pieces of context that would be easy to lose during a move. I wanted to go through it properly. An old date doesn’t make a conversation less interesting, and some of these mixes still affect me as much as when I first heard them. I would open one to fix something and end up listening again. That was probably the nicest interruption in the whole process. There were things I had almost forgotten, and others I remembered so clearly that it felt strange to see how many years had passed. Someone arriving today could be hearing any of them for the first time. I wanted them to have a proper chance to do that.
There’s one mix I wanted to leave here with these words. Hypnoskull’s STM 152 has been in my ears a lot over the years, and I feel very close to it. Its three parts, Heimweh, Widerstand and Angst, somehow feel connected to this whole rebuild too. I haven’t quite found the words for that. But if you want something to listen to while reading, this would be my choice.
Listen on Mixcloud
Going through old material also means finding out what has happened around it. A link that once led to a label can now lead nowhere, or somewhere completely unrelated. I found old music links that had become gambling pages. A player could still be sitting in an article even though the service behind it had disappeared. A photograph might have lost its credit somewhere along the way. None of that gets repaired just by giving the page a new layout. There was a lot of checking, finding a reliable source again, correcting something, or leaving a historical name in place without sending a reader to a destination I couldn’t stand behind. I couldn’t recover everything, and I didn’t want to fill gaps with guesses.
The people behind the older articles mattered too. The journal has had contributions from different writers over the years, even though I run it on my own now. Old accounts had disappeared and some texts had ended up filed under my name. I wanted the original credits restored where I could establish them. If I added a new introduction or reflection to an older interview, it needed to be clear which words were written then and which were added now. It takes longer to do it that way. Still, I would have felt wrong making the archive look refreshed while losing the people and circumstances that made it in the first place.
02Listening and reading
Most of the new features came from things I needed myself. I could remember an artist appearing somewhere in a mix, but have no idea which one. So the search now goes inside tracklists as well as articles. I would find something I wanted to hear later, promise myself I would come back, then forget where it was. That is what Saved is for. I also worked on the filters and the connections between mixes, because there are different ways of arriving here. Sometimes you know exactly what you want. Sometimes you have a year, a place or a name in mind. Sometimes you just want to put something on and follow it somewhere you weren’t expecting. In that sense I made this for myself, and kept trying to imagine how somebody else might use it. You might have ten minutes now and two hours another day. You might come for one artist and leave with a name you’ve never heard before. I wanted the site to make room for that without making you learn how to use it first.
The player took a ridiculous amount of attention. I wanted to be able to start a mix, read an interview and keep moving through the journal while the music kept playing. That sounds like a simple sentence. Getting it to behave properly across browsers was another matter. Something would work in Chrome and then Safari would need a second click inside a player I hadn’t wanted to make people deal with in the first place. Then there were the states around starting playback. A button saying Pause while you still couldn’t hear anything. A brief Loading message arriving at the wrong moment. I kept coming back to those details because they were exactly the sort of thing that would annoy me if I had come here to listen.
And there were much smaller things, which somehow still managed to take an evening. A loading message pushing the publication details down for a fraction of a second. The next mix’s photograph flashing before it settled. A Play button that looked fine in a screenshot but moved unpleasantly under the pointer. A tracklist sitting in the wrong place. A button that was harder to hit than it needed to be. An invitation to listen that actually took you to an article and left you to work out the next step. I spent a lot of time clicking around, reading, scrolling and getting irritated with my own website. Some of it probably sounds excessive written down. But these are the things you feel while using a place, even if you never stop to name them.
03Everything around the pages
There was also the work behind the pages. The server, recovery after the attacks, old addresses, redirects, security, speed, the way pages are found and the way a link looks when someone shares it. I checked things that had no visible effect when they worked, but could make a complete mess when they didn’t. An old link still needs to take someone to the right article. A shared mix needs to show its own photograph and title. The recordings and original photographs needed to survive the move. I wanted to get on with writing many times and found myself dealing with one more technical problem instead. That was exhausting.
I worked through SoundCloud, Mixcloud and YouTube too, updating the profiles, descriptions, links and visual material. I wanted them to feel connected to the journal. The archive also gave me the material for the new collages and section banners. Earlier versions of the site, old marks and interpretations, artists who have been part of it at different times. I like seeing those things together. The rough print and photocopy feeling already belonged here, so I could develop that instead of giving the whole thing an unrelated new appearance. There was a lot of choosing, cropping, comparing and checking how the same material worked in very different spaces.
The newsletter is coming back as part of this too. I keep finding out weeks later that I missed something I would have wanted to hear or read. I wanted a more direct way to keep in touch with the people who are interested in what I publish. Even that needed more thought than putting an email field in a footer. What happens after someone enters their address? Do they understand that they need to check their inbox? Is it clear when they have actually finished signing up? I went back through those steps because they had become confusing. I want the letter to be something useful and occasional, with enough in it to make opening it worthwhile.
04The next publication
Meanwhile, the editorial work was still happening. Arranging mixes, writing to artists, following up on conversations, editing texts, preparing new interviews and trying to give the journal a presence outside the website. Some of those conversations take a very long time. I often felt I had too much open at once, and I wanted to be able to give a text the attention it needed without thinking about a broken page in the background. But hearing what was being prepared, or getting a good conversation back from someone, was also what kept me interested when I was tired of the rebuild. The Emra Grid mix I’m preparing has more than fifty tracks in it, and I’m really looking forward to sharing that. There are other mixes and interviews in progress too. I would like more of my evenings to go into those now.
I hope the artists and writers who were part of the journal years ago will be happy to find their work here again, with care given to how it is presented and who was involved. People gave me their time, trusted me with a mix, answered questions, sent photographs. I still feel responsible for what they gave this place. And I hope someone making interesting work now can look around and think, yes, I’d like to do something here. That matters when I’m deciding what to change and what to keep. I want the journal to remain a place with its own taste, its own odd corners, where someone’s work gets attention beyond the week it comes out. There is a lot here I still want people to spend time with, and a lot I still want to publish.
I’m relieved to have reached the point where I can invite you in properly. There will be things I notice later and want to improve. Knowing myself, I will probably still get distracted by a button. But I want to leave a record of this point as well, before I get used to the new site and forget how much it took to get here. This journal has been a huge part of my adult life. I care a ridiculous amount about what happens here. I hope you can feel some of that when you use it. Have a look around when you have time. Try an old mix, read a conversation you missed, see where the archive takes you. And if you find something you want another person to hear, send it to them. I’d be very happy about that. Now I’d like to get on with the next publication :)
Justinas aka S13