Introduction
Here’s the major announcement: there’s a newly updated CerebralAudio site that went online over the weekend. But it’s more than that, the whole CerebralRift site has been updated as well.
Back in August I decided to start on a crazy scheme: start my very own Netlabel. It wasn’t really planned out all that well, being driven by my personal desire to make two ambient / drone releases available for download to the world, but do it in a slightly different way. I wanted to make a range of various audio quality levels of each release available, and I wanted to allow people to make donations using either PayPal or BitCoin. After a quick survey of the available options, I didn’t find any that suited me.
Hence, the first iteration of CerebralAudio Netlabel was born as a quickly hacked together set of static web pages on The CerebralRift. They served the immediate purpose of making the releases available for free, and allowing flexible donations if one desired to make a donation. (To date there has been one donation, which I am very grateful and appreciative for.)
However, with an upcoming new release in the works, I thought it was time to overhaul things a bit on this end…
Updated CerebralAudio Site
The updated system includes quite a few major new features:
- New shopping cart system
- Email receipts
- Suggested donations
- Slightly improved navigation
Another part of the changes to the site is a major overhaul to the layout of the site. The primary focus of this portion of the update is to make navigation easier. Clear away a lot of the distracting cruft that had been pushed onto the various pages and articles. The site now allows you to focus on the main content of each page. The menu (in the upper right hand corner) pops open to reveal a re-organized version of the information that used to clutter the pages before. The new layout also works much better with mobile devices.
While these improvements have been long over due, this is really only the first iteration of the changes that will be coming in the following weeks. I will be moving some things around a bit, hope to clean up a few of the less-than-polished parts of the site, and work on some other slightly quirky parts of the site.
Things that haven’t changed
So, I know there will be people that will be worried that other things have changed about the site. Well, I can say that most of the things about the site are still the same, here’s a short list:
- All reviews and articles are still available
- All episodes of The CerebralMix podcast are still available
- All of the RSS feeds are still the same
- Both CerebralAudio releases are still available
That accounts for well over ninety-five percent of the site. So, if you are searching for something you read or saw on the site before, it is probably still here, with a few exceptions…
A few things that did change
There were a few things that were removed or updated during this process for various reasons. Here’s a list of the bigger ones:
- OO Radio Page removed – it was broken. The player wasn’t working, and since CerebralMix will no longer be running on OO Radio, it seemed appropriate to remove.
- The Calendar page was removed: I hadn’t updated the calendar in over a year. It wasn’t serving any real purpose at this point, and was really kind of outdated by today’s web standards. I’ll install a new one if there is a need for it.
- Menu re-structuring – I decided to do a bit of cleanup in this area as it now serves the role of the menu, the side bar, and footer of the old site.
- CerebralAudio release pages were removed, and re-directed to the new release pages.
- Adding some new redirects to fix old / broken links.
- Re-optimizing all the images on the site. (My old image optimizer plugin had made some changes that made it less desirable to keep using.)
- Added a CDN to help speed up the site (due to overhead from the new layout). This has actually been on my list to do for a long time as I had a CDN before I switched hosting services.
- cerebralrift.org redirects to www.cerebralrift.org, this was a requirement for the CDN.
- Spent some time cleaning up unused, and / or unnecessary extensions on the site.
Really most of this is behind-the-scenes stuff you won’t really notice. Only the first two items are notable changes, while the third will hopefully be an improvement.
Summary
So, I wasn’t really planning to put an updated CerebralAudio site online this weekend. But I felt now was the time as there will be a new release coming out in the next couple of weeks. The focus for this update has been in several areas:
- Cleaning up overall experience and navigation of the site
- Making the site even more mobile friendly
- Adding a new shopping cart system
- Supplying email receipts for items downloaded from CerebralAudio
- Adding suggested donations to the CerebralAudio releases
There will be a few tweaks and updates over the next few weeks, including one major update: the addition of an SSL certificate for secured browsing. Some things are still a bit quirky, but overall I hope you will find your experience on The CerebralRift and CerebralAudio Netlabel greatly improved.
