Hey everyone!
Today, I'm writing an update about an update. An update to the website, that is. I've made a bunch of changes over the last few days, and while it admittedly isn't as fun as releasing six albums all at once, I'm still pretty excited about how things came out.
You can, of course, just go to theghostpines.com and start clicking around if you're interested; however, I'm going to use this blog post to explain all the changes and the rationale behind them in exacting and unnecessary detail, because what else are blog posts for?
I started making some changes the other day because I've never really liked how the site shows up on mobile. This has been due partly to my own limitations (I don't browse sites often on my own phone and don't really have a good aesthetic sense of how a mobile site should be laid out, because I was born in the 80s), and partly the limitations of the Wix editor (it's great for desktop, but less so for mobile). Regardless, I wanted to make it better. So I did. I hope.
If you've visited the site any time in the last year or two, the basic structure hasn't changed much. I've changed the background, but, aesthetically, there aren't any big changes. The only real change to the home page other than a text update is that I replaced the home page video with a short clip from one of my recent live sessions.
Navigation has changed a bit, though. The News tab is still where it was, but the Music tab has gotten split into two tabs: Albums and Live. They're pretty self-explanatory, I think, but now when you click on either, you'll get a grid of album covers. Click on any cover, and you'll go to a page for that single recording, including the usual free stream/download options as well as some notes on the recording (a few recordings are missing notes now, but I'm literally starting on writing those after I finish this post).
I added a few new/old audio bits to the site during this revamp: you can now find audio from both of 2019's Triptych Sessions (tracked, tagged, and with cover art) under the Live tab, and the audio for the six episodes of 2020's Some Quarantine Sessions (tracked, tagged, and with cover art) under the Albums tab. These have both existed for a long time on the site as video files, and it was a pretty easy hour or so to edit the audio files and make them available. You won't be able to find these on Bandcamp because they all contain a number of covers, so they are website-only for now.
The Videos tab is similar, now. Instead of a pile of unrelated videos, you get a landing page that lets you choose from grouped videos from my various YouTube playlists. Click on any of those images, and you'll get a page of embedded, single YouTube videos that organize much better (especially on mobile!) than the Wix Player option I was using in the past.
I've removed the Lyrics tab entirely because any music of mine you play on the site through any player includes the lyrics to that song on the song's info page, making the Lyrics tab a little redundant.
I changed Photos a bit, too, but getting rid of the janky photo-highlight carousel I was using before and replacing it...with another janky photo-highlight carousel. It's not ideal, but it's become shockingly hard recently to find a place where I can host a bunch of high-res photographs in an album for free and then easily embed that album in my website for visitors to view. It's one of those things that was mysteriously easier to do online ten years ago than it is now...
Next up is the Notes tab, which is just a link to my Tumblr. I'm planning to use that in the future for any posts about pretty much anything that isn't a direct news update about the site or recording sessions or live shows (those updates will still be under the News tab), so I wanted to link more directly to it via the navigation bar. That means the social links to the right of the navigation bar are down to three.
I changed the photo on the About page. Yay.
I think that's pretty much it! The two new live recordings (7/26 and 7/27) are new, and there should be a few more of those coming down the pike really soon, but I'll save that for another news update. Thanks for reading!