Welcome to the most massive update Rigelatin has ever received in its 15 years of life! For my participation to the Our Kingdoms Eternal site marathon, I wanted to align the main Rigelatin site with my goals about fansite-making, which is to move away from the impression of my fansites as static informational essays to be read passively, and towards what I want out of this: conversation, interaction, dialogue!!
So for that purpose I made...
... A new layout for the main site! Featuring Visor from Quake III Arena / Champions. As you can see, it's positively monumental. I've never made anything like this before. Utter maximalism, there are little interactive details all over the page, so many that you may not even discover them all. Not to mention the insanely animated Visor artwork that I've made for it. That one is interactive too, but only you can discover how...
The project section has changed very little from the previous version; what has changed dramatically is the website presentation and mood. I hope it places Rigelatin as what it really is, which is, a fucking mess made from vibrating passion, not a clean and tidy glass case. And most importantly, it's made to interact with it! Interact! Interact!
...Speaking of interacting, Rigelatin now has a guestbook! As I wrote all over the site, this guestbook is to be taken as a site-wide comment section and you can and should write as many messages as you want whenever you're visiting Rigelatin. I fully expect you to leave a message there after you're done reading here :D
...Also speaking of interacting, I made a contact page for Rigelatin, so that I may link to this page in each about sections of each sub-site. It's just a web form, but I understand that nowadays people may not take the time to open their email inbox and paste in an address.
...And, naturally, the (gestures all around)! Wow! Look at this! The update log has never looked so good!
The update log is now located in its own directory, /updates. It now uses Stairwell, which enables it to have a proper tag system. That will be useful in the future, since the plan is to use this as a centralized update blog for every site hosted on Rigelatin. Previously, over here I mostly logged updates concerning the main Rigelatin site, while updates on each individual inner site were usually only logged there. The reason for this was because I fucking forgot. But now I've made a whole layout, and I now SOLEMNLY PROMISE that I will remember to use the update log. If I forget, I will add a tally next to Slash up there, representing the number of her middle fingers that are actually directed to me.
I mentioned that this update blog now runs on Stairwell. That's the system that Denise has been working on for the last 10 years, which powers Staircase Spirit and many of our more recent projects; it's a fantastic little CMS that bridges hand-coded HTML and CSS with more modern functions such as article pagination and tags. Denise has also joined the site marathon with the intention to finally release Stairwell to the world, so that's another awesome upcoming thing.
Now go sign the guestbook!