What’s happening here, then? Since the album release I’ve been neglecting my to-do list and instead TYFTH and music-related stuff has been pretty scattergun as I fit it around Real Life. Time to change that, starting with a spruce up of the site itself in preparation for the new forum.

As I’m usually safely tucked away in WordPress’ dashboard it has taken a while for me to realise quite how antiquated and user-unfriendly the site’s theme has become. The design was great, for sure, and that aesthetic tied in perfectly with a lot that went on here, but goodness me there was wasted space everywhere, now-redundant sidebars and cramped space for images and video. While I’m sure there are a million other options I could have gone for, with a few tweaks I think this might do the job very well – it’s intentionally a lot more minimal, has a nice amount of room for images (and even a new header), and also includes some actually-useful features like a ‘recent comment’ box on the right.

My reckoning is the new useability will make up for any pining over the loss of dark twirly design touches, but do let me know what you think. The other factor is the upcoming forum, and this will definitely allow more space for it – unfortunately the pilot version will likely be a desperately basic, vanilla effort, until I work out a few styling tricks. If anyone would like to help out on that front, please get in touch.

No more time this evening, but a few posts to test this layout will be on the way soon, and there could even be some forum action over the weekend…

I’ll do my best to get around to adding a few delayed posts soon, but in the meantime here’s a quick heads up that TYFTH now has a YouTube channel of its own. I’ll be reuploading some old videos from the plasmadancer account (which has ceased to be), along with previews from the album and elsewhere. I’m also adding a few of my favourite sets for those who still do their music listening on YT.

One of those ideas that has been lurking in the background for a long while, but now with In Praise of Shadows imminent it feels like time for a proper talk about a TYFTH forum. I’m grateful to a couple of Horsers for recently bringing up the topic, giving me a kick to look into how possible it would be with all the time restrictions I seem to be battling lately.

Seems like a bare bones WordPress forum would be doable with very little trouble (famous last words), which would at least be a start. Making it even slightly attractive might be beyond me, mind, so any advice from those who know would be welcome.

Interest around the compilation might mean a few new arrivals to the site, and potentially a new group of recruits to the TYFTH community. Even if dreams of the forum being a long-awaited replacement for the FINRG site turn out to be too optimistic, it’d be nice if the current TYFTH crew had a proper place for discussion and I wouldn’t be too bothered if it remained as niche as that.

Let me know if you think this is something worth pursuing – I’m confident that a release date for the compilation will be announced in a couple of days, and a simple forum could be the next project after that.