New Site
First off, you’ll notice you’re viewing this first post on a very much re-designed website. The back-end of the old site was based on code that was around ten years old and was starting to get fragmented. It was also becoming a right pain in the ass to update content and the task of updating content involved a lot of annoying work-arounds to get things displaying as they should. I sometimes use my own sites as “sand box” sites for testing new code for client sites that I develop as JJD Works and in this case there’s a lot of new things I tried out ahead of deploying acquired knowledge on upcoming client website jobs.
Overall, it looks better, it’s better organised and easier to update. There’s a lot of accumulated content on this site stretching back ten years. An attempt to upgrade it to fit the new site was done to the best of ability, but there’s a few things you might notice if you really dig around:
- Very old news posts might have some broken content, or broken links to other things. I’ll likely amend those as time goes on in a casual manner but it’s likely no-one is reading it so I probably won’t bother spending hours trying to go through 150-200 news posts to make it nice and pretty. Posts over 2018-2017 are the ones I’m mainly looking after.
- Some content has changed links so if you have an old link cached on some of the following you might get a 404 error. Some re-directs have been set up where applicable but in many cases not. It’s all there as before though.
- There’s likely some bugs on the site but I’ll get to them as I spot them.
New Songs
So that’s that. What else? Soft Riot’s final performance of 2018 was at the tail end of November and from there I opted to put a lot of other things on hold: promotion, bookings, general “band” admin — I needed a break and as little distraction as possible to get a bunch of new material completed. Since then there’s been a lot of time spent in the studio working on a bunch of new tracks. In fact, there’s two whole collections of tracks that will likely work as two separate releases. One set is a natural progression from the most recent album, The Outsider In The Mirrors, and the other is somewhat similar to Some More Terror, albeit with vocals and in a more reflective, atmospheric style. There’s no plans for how these are going to be released so far but that’s a work in progress.
If you’re a label, booker, promoter or anyone else that might be able to assist in moving these songs forward some sort of release, feel free to get in touch to listen to previews.
New Year
A lot of things have been reset and after a bit of a rest, things are starting to move forward again so expect to more information soon on upcoming events and more. Thanks again for all your support in the past year and here we go again!