A Site Update Tracker (and Making somnolescent.net Slightly Less Obscure)

One of the things the group and I realized over the past year is that it can be a little difficult keeping up with everything we get up to. I used to write monthly (and eventually seasonal) recaps here on Letters about everything that was going on, but I eventually stopped those out of fatigue and a lack of things to write about. That didn’t mean that things stopped happening across the site network, though–it just meant the main way to let people know what was going on around here dissipated, and I imagine a lot of cool stuff has gone unnoticed as a result.

No longer. Right on the homepage of our top-level site, you can now check to see all of the recent site updates across our site network. Better yet? There’s a feed for your reader, if you’re into that sorta thing. And if you wanna talk about any of this stuff, there’s a place for that too now! Let me fill you in one last time…

The Somnolescent Site Update Tracker

With my newfound PHP knowledge, I cooked up a quick little page that would grab the twenty most recent updates to somnolescent.net from a database. I still have to write these up and put them into the database, but they’re quite literally a few sentences and a link, so they’re a lot less work than a full blog post. Updates get one type out of seven–new pages, removed pages, sites being redesigned, that sorta thing–which I used to color code the table. As a result, from a glance, you can easily see not just what’s been updated, but also what kind of updates took place.

The Somnolescent Site Update Tracker

If you’re wondering why I didn’t just build this page out of basic HTML, as would’ve been most efficient, here’s why. If you’re not familiar with what an RSS feed is, it’s an old-school (late 90s, but RSS really gained traction circa 2005-2006) format that provides content in a way that makes it really easy to check a ton of sites in one place. Blogs would each have an RSS feed you could subscribe to, and you’d use an RSS reader to catch up on them all in one place. You’d get a nice feed of links and summaries you could scroll through, and you’d hop across tons of different sites as their content catches your eye. Social media sites kinda nuked RSS’ prominence, but some people (myself included) still swear by them, and blog software like WordPress and Tumblr still generate RSS feeds for anyone to use.

The nice thing about PHP and databases is that you’re able to format the data any which way you want. Instead of making three near-identical updates in three different places, you simply add the data once, and PHP formats it those three different ways for you. So, I can add the update to the database, PHP generates a Web page for you to manually visit in one place, and then PHP will also generate an RSS feed that people can use with their RSS readers to aggregate Somnolescent happenings with the rest of the sites they’ve subscribed to, all automatically.

In short, this makes it massively easier to keep up with what’s going on across everyone’s sites. I don’t blame anyone for not having the time to check my site, dcb’s site, Caby’s site, Savannah’s site, the blog, and so on one after another–so centralizing all updates in one place should make it a lot easier for anyone lurking to keep an eye on things to whatever degree they’d like.

Somnolescent IRC on Rizon

There’s a second update to go along with this pseudo-recap, and that involves a public chatroom for Somnolescent! Funnily enough, back in 2014, Somnolescent actually started as an IRC room between a young Cammy, a young Savannah, and some other former Somnolians on the now-defunct Foonetic network (RIP, you were good to us). IRC always fascinated me, and I can never stay away from having a room on IRC for myself or my group somewhere online, even if rarely anyone visits it.

Aw bummy
Somnol in-jokes make for the best site graphics.

Somnolescent has a room once again, this time on the Rizon network. If you fancy chatting with us, all the details are available on the IRC page on the top-level site. There is a browser chat applet that runs on that page courtesy of KiwiIRC, but it sadly seems to be down right now, as of writing this. Thankfully, if you’re a more tech-savvy type, there’s tons of IRC clients for literally every platform, from Windows 9x to Windows NT, Linux, graphical and terminal, MacOS, iOS, Android, I think DOS? You get the idea. Install your own, register your nick, and hang out with us! I’ll do my best to keep up with who shows up, but apologies if it takes me a bit.

More upgrades to essential somnol.net infrastructure?

Yeah, there’s a bit more on the way. My focus for the site network (still really my pride and joy, and the thing I enjoy working on most of all) has been adding context, making it a little less incomprehensible and giving it more signs of life than it’s currently got. A lot of that is centered around the top-level site, naturally, but keep an eye on archives too. Eventually, a new site will appear in its place, and it’ll look a lot cuter and be a lot easier to browse. I just have to finish it up. Eventually.

(And you’ll know it’s up by if I posted it to the update tracker, of course.)

About bulb

Group posts, recaps, and things we all contributed to. Hopefully, our hum-to-English translation is intelligible enough.
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3 Responses to A Site Update Tracker (and Making somnolescent.net Slightly Less Obscure)

  1. bear says:

    Someone is using your logo and harassing random people including children en masse on neocities under ‘exanet.’ Is that one of you

    • mariteaux says:

      No, it is not. We’re all grown adults with lives and no attachment to Neocities anymore (outside of Caby maintaining a site mirror there).

      Edit: lmao that’s pretty funny nice meme jake

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