by bulb

If you haven’t yet noticed, you’ve had 30 entire days to do so: it’s spooky month. This does not in any way call for a recap, but here we are nonetheless. Nowhere near as long as the last one, promise. Come! There’s Eevees!

Caby’s Annual Halloween Shenanigans

As seems to happen every year around this time, Caby has brought out her piggo mascots for Halloween. This year, Candy Corn leads the group astray, into the twisted woods for…something or another. You don’t have much longer to read it (November 1st or so…), so get in while you can.

Continued AutoSite XL Development

Meanwhile, dotcomboom continues to toil away at AutoSite XL. Getting awful close to a 1.0 gold release, and it’s matured considerably in the last two months. If you’re still not sure what it is, I like to call it a templating engine where your pages are linked to easily-manageable templates; hundreds of pages can be rebuilt with a few quick changes, without the need for scripting or loading data after the fact. It spits out pure, speedy, static HTML for when you need pure, speedy, static HTML.

It’s incredibly useful, as someone who’s used it since the Python days, and now that it’s got a lightweight GUI and an editor and everything, you have no reason not to try it out. In fact, I recently rebuilt my site to use it, which should save me some hassle for future updates.

Misery Inspires

And speaking of my sites, my very first one is now online! A redone version of it, anyway. The desire to do an old-school fansite for a band I adore (Silversun Pickups) has been with me even before I joined Neocities, but I was never quite able to finish it the way I wanted to. It was too much work, and work I didn’t exactly want to do for that matter. For three years, two different builds of it languished in my website folder, which was a damn shame. I had so much researched and poured into it, it really deserved better.

But thanks to Caby’s hype and a sudden scaling back of plans, Misery Inspires is now a thing on the actual internet. I’d ideally like to add more photo galleries and interviews and whatnot, but as of right now, I’m really rather pleased with it.

Working on this site (and recently seeing the Pickups on tour) has really rekindled my interest in the band and the Silver Lake music scene as a whole. I’ve been a little rabid about tracking down some ephemera and rare CD-Rs from the time period to show off, but getting ripped off has slowed those plans down. Here’s hoping my attempts to contact Aaron Espinoza aren’t in vain, because I have a lot to write about. In the meantime, here’s an ancient SSPU demo I unearthed.

Pennyverse Happenings

It’s still a little quiet and dormant, but I did write two little stories featuring Apricot Bay’s own cryptid, Gonzo, “To Exhaustion” and “Classifieds”. He’s a fun character to write for, definitely a little beast in his own right. There’ll be more to come of it when I’m in a little more of a writing mood, promise.

Infrastructure Improvements

We’re pretty much forcing HTTPS across our entire domain now. A lot of our HTTP traffic came from bots and most of our sites don’t work on Netscape anyway. If there comes a time when minerteaux comes back out of the closet or what have you, we can disable it per-site (or per-directory, perhaps), but for now, you’ll need something newer than IE8 to peek.

I have a ton of plans to beef up Somnolescent’s architecture come next year, and I’ll be outlining those in a later blog post. In fact, as dead as the blog’s been lately, there’ll be tons of updates in December (and Somnol’s one-year anniversary!), so grab an RSS reader and get comfy.

In the meantime, we’re going trick-or-treating.