Wow, it's been almost 2 months since I first posted about Weird Waves here, and over a month and a half since the last Weird Waves post here too. I stopped putting updates here cause there were too many of them and it would've gotten a little silly, so for detailed updates on the alpha version check out the News section on the site itself, but here's the big changes since my last post.

Some of the bigger changes

More shows

I dunno exactly how many shows I had on there at the start of August, but now there's 68 (…almost nice) and my goal's to get to 100 before October begins. Now there's 4 different sources: three Old Time Radio (OTR) anthologies from the 30s–60s, and Mindwebs, a series of short story readings from later last century. The pace slowed a bit in September since I've been working more on the app, but I think the rest of the shows up to 100 are gonna be mostly more OTR with a few LibriVox recordings and maybe one or two Magnus Archives episodes.

Colours!

Gone is the stark, default black-and-white colour scheme with the badly-coloured nav buttons. Now it's got a neat, but low-key theme of pallid yellow on abyssal blue, with some extra accents in red and yellow. At some point I'm gonna add other custom themes.

Fonts!

Specifically, one font, but I used some text-shadow effects to make the bigger headings stand out. It's Bitter by Sol Matas (it's a Google font, but hosted locally). That's on top of a stack of websafe serif fonts. I might pick a sans font and make a sans font stack so people can switch between the two.

Layout!

The layout's a little improved on mobile and now there's a widescreen layout with the radio player stuck on the left and all the rest of the site on the right. A bunch of smaller details are also improved (show/series headings in the archive, schedule, and radio), and some interactive details with transitions (like the nav buttons, or the toggle switches in the Settings tab). Speaking of…

Settings!

The site's got 3 settings you can change so far:

• mute audio when tuning in (off by default; when it's on, if you tune in while a show is on then the show will start out muted)
• content notes shown by default (closed by default; when open, all content notes will automatically display instead of having to be clicked open)
• dynamic forecast (on by default; the forecast tables only show present/future shows this week and remove shows as they end; if switched off then the Forecast shows every show this week)

They're pretty simple, but there's more stuff coming with e.g. colour schemes and show bookmarking.

More efficient(?) schedule scripting

Two changes: first, the app saved a copy of the schedule in your browser if it's a new schedule (and not the default schedule), which should make it load quicker so that app can start using it sooner (I dunno too much about that though). Second, the app gets the show info for each show on the schedule and writes that into the schedule, so other parts of the app can get the data from the (much smaller) schedule data instead of going through the whole site looking for it.

Way simpler archive

The Archive no longer has airdates or links to sources for each individual show (sources get linked per-series instead). Show metadata got turned from a grid-list into just a paragraph of blurb and some content notes in a disclosure widget. You download less data and there're fewer HTML nodes in the site (the number of nodes in the Archive is down by about half). That's important because eventually there's gonna be 7–8 times as many shows in there.

Show lengths

During a show, the radio now shows roughly when the show ends. Most shows are gonna be 20–30 minutes long, but now even if not, there's a hint to how long they really are.

Station stats

The “About” page now has stats at the bottom (they used to be on their own “Stats” page, but I folded them together) showing how many days the station's been broadcasting, then a couple stats about the archive (how many sources, how many shows, how many shows per source).

What next?

There's a big to-do list in the News section on the site right now, but it basically boils down to:

• more layout and styling tweaks
• add/change a couple icons, including the site's way-outdated favicon
• rewrite the FAQ's HTML to have answers you can show/hide
• fill out the empty “Call In”, “Support”, and “Links” pages
• start writing RSS updates
• shift the whole site over here after becoming a NeoCities Supporter

Since there's no server backend I can easily shift it over here (that was my plan all along, but since you can't upload audio or use custom domains with a basic NeoCities account I stayed with my own hosting while I was building it up). Then there's the other stuff to do, and schedules to make (there's 3 weeks scheduled right now: Crime and Punishment, Creature Features, and Horror on Wheels), some social media stuff to set up…

So yeah, Weird Waves should be in beta by the start of October!