…where I wrote the script that runs the app, built up the main 10 sections (Schedule, Forecast, News, About, Archive, FAQ, Settings, Call In, Support, and Links), designed the basic layout and colour scheme, added the first 100 shows to the Archive (actually 104, by accident), and, finally, moved the site to static hosting at Neocities.
…where I started talking about the site on social media and worked my way up to 260 shows, while tightening up the basic script, fixing bugs, and adding some new features to make the site more useable (colour theme picker, landing page, personal primetime).
…where I made the final tweaks and fixes to the site and worked up to 366 shows (after cutting many shows, making the original goals of 520, then 500, pretty much impossible).
…where I transformed Weird Waves from a fake radio with scheduled shows to a more conventional audio player where you can choose shows from the Archive, add them to a playlist in the Booth, and play them when you want in the Radio (during this change I also cut and changed the main sections of the site to Booth, Archive, About, Streaming, Settings, Call In, and Links).
Over the past few days I've been adding more and more shows. From Quiet, Please:
And from Suspense:
I also added a Stats page with a few stats about the station (days broadcasting and total series/sources and shows), plus the breakdown of shows from each series/source.
I've only been testing in Firefox, so I decided to check how the app looks in both Chrome (mostly fine) and Safari (not so much). The one issue I saw in Chrome is now fixed (the Forecast tables had the wrong width for the times column). The issues I saw in Safari are now mostly-fixed:
There's one really important problem with Safari, which is that shows don't start mid-way through if you arrive mid-way through, they always start from the very beginning. That's obviously a critical flaw! Might also be pretty bad for non-Safari browsers on iOS because all browsers on iOS are just skins over Safari's engine. I've found a couple possible solutions that I'm gonna try next week.
I also changed the CSS for a few other things, like the borders in the Archive (added a bottom border in both desktop and mobile versions) and the nav buttons (now on two lines to split the show stuff (top) from the station stuff (bottom).
All that aside, I also added a few more shows:
My goal's to get to 100 shows by the start of October—I'm almost a third of the way there with over 50 days to go. There'll be some more OTR shows (most or all from Lights Out and Suspense), then I'll move on to podcast episodes (Magnus Archives, Pseudopod, etc.) and hopefully some youtube book readings.
First big thing is I fixed the issue where Safari (and other webkit browsers e.g. anything on iOS) would only play a show from the very beginning, no matter what time you clicked the "tune in" button. For instance, if you tuned in at 15 minutes past, the player should load the show at 15 minutes in, but Safari would start at the very beginning of the file. If you tuned in at 40 minutes past (right now there aren't any shows longer than ~30 mins) then the player should load the intermission, but Safari would still start at the very beginning of the show.
The fix is in place, but it comes at a (minor) cost: the player now has to wait until the server tells it how long the show file is. It can then use that to calculate how far along it should start playing the file, or whether it should go to an intermission.
Firefox and Chrome didn't have Safari's issue: they knew the duration before the server even sends it to them. From what I read, they estimate it based on the audio's bitrate and filesize without needing to wait for the server to send them the file's metadata (like its duration). They still use the new code, though, so they all take a little time (usually ~1 second at most) to tune in.
So that means it should all work fine in any of the major browsers.
Other changes:
There's also a bunch more shows, all from the same series: Mindwebs. These are the first shows from Mindwebs, so you can find all the new shows listed under Mindwebs in the Archive.
First, I've taken the content of the Stats page and added it to the end of the About page. Second, I've put News on the top line of the nav bar, Archive in the middle line, and added a new (but empty) Settings page also on the middle line—the nav bar's taking shape a bit more, with changing content (schedule, forecast, news, and later RSS) on top, then less-often-changing station content (about, FAQ, archive, settings) in the middle, then links elsewhere on the bottom.
Second, all the menu links have icons! I dunno how final these versions are, but there'll definitely be something like them in the final site.
Finally, I added a bunch more shows, bringing the total count to 50. From Suspense:
From Mindwebs:
From Quiet, Please:
Goal: reach beta and have 100 shows in the archive by the start of October. By beta I mean proper styling, finalised layout, RSS feed, and a few other little things.
New shows from Quiet, Please:
I'm actually running out of Quiet, Please episodes to add, since I've checked 86 of 106 and added all those I thought would be a good fit. I think there'll probably be about 40 or more episodes in the Archive by the end of it—the others being repeats, or not the right kinda story for the station, or rejected for other reasons.
From Lights Out:
That might actually be everything I'll add from this series, but I'm not 100% on that.
Just discovered and fixed a bug where the script would set the date wrong when the week's schedule started in one month and ended in the next month.
Now there's a basic colour scheme, webfonts, and hover+focus effects on the navigation buttons!
I also fixed an annoyingly hard-to-fix issue with some of the icons not displaying right in Chrome and Safari.
The colour scheme could still use some finessing, and I need to work on the site header, player controls (buttons and volume sliders), <cite> appearance (I'm not too sure about having italics all over the place), and having the layout adapt better to wider and narrower window sizes.
There's a few more changes, mainly to headings, but the main reason I'm uploading changes now is because the (invisible) icon storage gets in the way of the tune-in button when the window's narrow.
Made a few changes to how the main script handles the schedule, which should make the app faster.
There's a couple more changes I gotta make to this, but it basically works (in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome anyway).
I've also been cutting the filesize (and number of elements) by removing irrelevant data from the archive. If I'm getting all the audio files for a particular series from a collection on the Internet Archive then I don't need separate links to each one, for instance. I also cut the airdates, since I don't think they add much for the app specifically (and they're available in the sources for each show). There's more I could potentially cut, but I've gotta figure out how to restructure the data I'd keep.
I've cut the archive down to the bare minimum I think's necessary for this app: blurbs and content notes. That cuts a load of nodes in the archive, and a few more kB of data. The archive (and schedule and radio) also have some new styling! It uses less CSS and (I think) looks nicer and more consistent.
The content notes also have a new look, since the way they're built is slightly different (instead of the spoilered notes being part of a list, all notes go in the spoiler). I also moved a couple "non-content-notes" notes to their blurbs.
There's a couple other things going on, like in all places where show titles are copied (Schedule, radio, and Forecast) they have the series name bolted onto the start, and the fonts are subsetted down to just the Latin characters and some symbols and punctuation (they take up about half the space now).
Make sure to do a hard refresh to see the changes as early as possible!
Firstly, intermission audio is gone—I was always on the fence about it and after deciding I probably wouldn't ever change the intermission audio I decided it'd be simpler to cut it entirely.
Secondly, there's a few more details in the Settings tab about what kinda settings there'll be.
Thirdly, the nav buttons are now fully set up in the About tab.
Finally, I've started renaming the script and stylesheet files for each new version I upload, so you shouldn't have to do a hard refresh to update the site immediately when I change their contents.
I've styled navigation links so the currently-selected one is different from the others; also now the page title (that text you see in the browser tab) changes not only when you click any nav-link or refresh the page, but also when you click the back button.
There's also one new setting (super-crudely-presented, though) that toggles the visibility of content notes. Click it to show/hide all notes across the app (in the archive, schedule, and radio player). You'll need to refresh before the schedule and radio notes catch up, though. The setting also gets saved by your browser, so if you refresh or come back to the app later it'll still have your setting picked.
Finally, there's a new view mode when the window/device is wider than 1240px: it puts the radio container in a box on the left that sticks to the top of the screen. It's a little rough right now, but it works fine.
There are now three settings, cleanly laid-out and with a neat toggle-switch effect—the third, new one sets whether audio's muted when you tune in. Widescreen mode's also been tweaked a little and there've been a couple other minor changes to the script.
The non-toggle buttons are missing a bit of styling right now, since I undid the default styling but haven't finished re-styling them. The toggle buttons could probably also do with a little bit of extra styling, but I'm not 100% on that.
Looking back at the goal I set on the 26th of August: I've got 68/100 shows, styling and layout are roughly done (done for the beta, anyway) with a few exceptions (nav bar on narrow windows/devices, FAQ structure, little tweaks to news and a couple other things), and the RSS feed is halfway there (I just need to start writing new items). To-do list before October:
I updated the way the app stores schedules locally, and also added some more credits and content notes to Suspense shows (the credits were for Lucille Fletcher and Vincent Price and the content notes were for the Roma Wine ads that play before and during some shows).
Also fixed a bug where the "open content notes by default" setting couldn't toggle because I accidentally set its value to be constant, and removed the fifth colour in the colour scheme (the deeper red; it was barely used and harder to read than the other two special colours). The toggles set to "on" now fill in with the pale red instead of the lines changing to deep red.
New Quiet, Please episodes:
I've just got 15 more to check before I've finished everything in the series…
Here are the last of the Quiet, Please episodes I've added to the station (for the foreseeable future):
I also re-ordered content notes alphabetically per show, refactored the app's styles to be mobile-first, and tweaked the mobile display a little (mostly how the nav buttons display, so now they won't go off the edges of the screen except on super-tiny phones).
The station now has the option to tune out (instead of just closing the page) so you don't have to have muted audio downloading and playing! There's a bunch of other changes too:
First, a bunch of small(ish) interface changes:
The Call In, Support, and Links sections now have some basic info in them! Super-placeholder-y, but a little more than before.
I also decided to bring back intermission audio, since otherwise, with dead silence in the intermission, when you tune in it's harder to recognise ASAP that you're actually tuned in and the station hasn't hit an error.
The new shows come from Suspense, and bring the total count to 90:
Tomorrow I'm gonna move everything to Neocities and finish off the last few things on the alpha-to-beta checklist (including the last 10 shows to get to 100).
There's more to post about once this is done, but for the moment the important thing is that the move to Neocities is in progress! I need to sort some stuff out on the old host and then add a few things to the site on Neocities, but it's mostly done.
I'm having some HSTS trouble, but I think that's just on my end and should work itself out once my computer stops caching the address of the old hosting.
This morning the HSTS error went away, then came back again an hour later. No matter what solutions I try, I can't get through—but at least everyone else I've asked has been able to see the site fine. I guess I'm just gonna have to wait the full 24-48 hours to see if it fixes itself.
In the meantime I'm still gonna do the last few things I need to do to get this thing from alpha to beta. First, I've added 6 shows from LibriVox:
I also added 4 shows from The Magnus Archives to the Archive, each one a double-feature (since the episodes aren't that long), but I still need to cut and stitch their audio files.
Last change I've actually put in place is an “Intermission” note that appears in the radio player during intermissions as an extra sign that the station's doing an intermission.
What's left to do?
Bugfix: fixed a problem where toggles set to “off” on pageload wouldn't update the first time they were clicked (so the setting would change, but the toggle wouldn't, desyncing the toggle and the setting so they were actually opposites until you refreshed the page).
Just done the last few tweaks, moved the alpha news to a news News Archive page, added a super-simple spinner icon that shows when the station's getting a schedule and tuning in, and finished adding the last few shows to get over 100, all from The Magnus Archives:
One other little thing I did was update the default schedule (which the app uses if it can't find the weekly one on the server). Now it's got 16 good shows taken from the 100 on the station! Instead of literally just the first 7 shows I added, but in reverse order.
That finally brings the station to beta, with the first 100 shows and all the basic setup, layout, and features in place. Post coming soon about the next steps!
Quick news post cause I found and fixed a new bug caused by adding the tune-out button last week (specifically, by another part of code I changed to make tuning out work properly). The bug only affected the station in the last hour of the week and made it play the last show from next week's schedule instead of the last show from the current week's schedule.
This is now fixed (hopefully), along with another bug caused by the fix.
Today I realised the bug-fix I just applied actually adds new problems, and the solution to those problems also adds new problems etc.
I'm calling the bug the final-hour bug because it only happens if you tune in to an ongoing show in the final hour of the current forecast (the final hour of the week in the station's timezone). If you tune in before the hour and let the show start automatically, you'll hear the last show on the current week's forecast (this is what should happen). If you tune in during the show instead, then you'll hear the last show on the next week's forecast.
I've figured out that, at least the way the app's coded right now, I can either have the right show play for everyone in the final hour, or I can have the ability to tune out and back in again. If everyone got the wrong show I'd probably accept that the bug exists and just treat it like a teaser; it's the fact that different people get different shows that bothers me, so I'm probably gonna switch back to the old way things worked, where you tuned in once and that was that.
After getting rid of the tune-out button and code to try and fix the final-hour bug I realised caused another bug, so I'm just gonna accept the final-hour bug is a part of the app now (unless I radically rewrite it, which I'm definitely not gonna do right now).
Here's my list of things to do in beta:
Instead of landing straight on news, it'd be neat to have a little landing page that pulls in stuff from other pages (recent news titles, show names on the schedule, the next few shows on the Forecast, a little About-style intro, etc.).
Right now it's mostly just the same as this page, which is mostly fine except for the widescreen layout.
Plus general improvements to the scripts, stylesheet (e.g. using relative sizes), and page sections, and getting up to 250 shows in the Archive.
Couple small changes to style, e.g. the opacity of the external-link symbol, and added some links to the Links section to start off with. They're a mix of general horror/old media/weird stuff, other tiny online radio stations, and little games/toys/tools/apps.
Now every section's got at least something in it.
First, a bugfix: I fixed an issue with the “tune-in mute” setting, where it made the station switch audio between muted and unmuted instead of only setting audio to be muted.
Second, I added timestamps for certain loud SFX in the content notes for their shows.
I've also added a bunch more Magnus Archives shows:
Finally, I noticed the Mindwebs audio was stuttering at the start. That might've been down to the filesize (the files are 2-3 times as big as the ones for other series), since I haven't seen that with other shows (yet), so I re-exported the audio with lower settings and mono instead of stereo.
Updated how the settings were displayed a little to make them more concise and easier to read.
Made a bunch of subtle style changes (the most obvious ones are things like the "show-until" and "up-next" messages no longer being smaller and less opaque than the rest of the show heading in the Radio).
I've also been testing out alternate colour schemes, so the theme picker'll probably be the next major feature I add. Here's the default colours and the other two themes I've been working on:
Now there's a landing page! Instead of just dumping you in the News section the site gives you the latest news (highlighting posts added since you last visited the site, with 24 hours of leeway), info about the schedule, and the upcoming shows on the forecast. There's a similar, but way more basic section in the news archive page (plus a new timeline section).
I've also added a theme-picker to the Settings section, with 4 basic themes: dark, light, goop, and wine.
Added 8 more themes: flame, plasm, moss, darker, ash, dust, mist, and silver. That's it for now. I also swapped the detail colours for the wine theme.
I also made a couple changes to how the scripts are organised, tweaked the waveform decorations on the landing page, fixed a minor issue with document title changes in the News Archive, and switched the positions of the volume slider and mute button (now volume on left and mute on right) so the clicking the mute/unmute button doesn't change the volume slider's position.
Added a font picker! It works the same as the theme picker in that it's a set of buttons for different options. Right now there's only two (and I don't have plans to add more any time soon): serif and sans-serif. The serif font's the default Weird Waves has used up to now (Bitter) and the sans-serif is Fira Sans.
There's another new setting called “personal primetime”, which is basically just a way to mark ranges of time on the Forecast (e.g. if you're able to listen to shows in that span of time). I cut the dynamic vs static forecast setting to simplify this and also fix another problem (when the forecast was static, the upcoming forecast on the landing page would only show the first few shows on the Forecast, not the current/next few shows from the current time).
I also added some more Suspense shows:
And 3 shows from a new series/source, SCP Archives:
Added some more SCP Archives shows:
As well as two non-horror Quiet, Please episodes:
I've also made a number of changes to tighten up the scripts, and built a new script that lets me generate themed schedules from a big list of shows I've tagged up (with themes like "machinery", "travel", "murder" and so on).
Turns out there was a problem with the Forecast being offset when the week starts in DST and ends in regular time (or vice versa, probably). That should be fixed now!
I also added 5 more Quiet, Please shows:
Lastly, I cleaned up the “personal primetime” setting a bit. Now the extra inputs slide and fade in/out when you activate/deactivate the setting, and the explanation's a lot shorter.
Until now, the site's appeared in the Dark theme for a fraction of a second when you arrive even if you picked a different theme in Settings. That should now be fixed, or shorter at least.
The same applies to the font (but it's less noticeable than the colours).
Here's the to-do list for the rest of beta:
The first's pretty self-explanatory. Second's gonna be the app by itself, with all the Weird Waves-specific content and styling (and script, but there probably isn't much) stripped out. Third's just something I wanna do to cut that icon's code down to the same size as the rest of the icons on the site; everything else is under 300 B, but the News icon's over 750 and also not on a grid. Neither's a huge problem, I just think there's probably a simpler way to do the lightning bolts that fixes both issues.
I'm thinking Jan/Feb next year to get to 250 shows, but the other stuff should be quicker (maybe done before December).
I've updated the mute-tune-in function so now that setting mutes no matter whether you're tuning into a show or an intermission instead of just when tuning into a show. I also tweaked the toggle switches to be in line with the other inputs look.
Just made some changes to the way settings are stored and recalled, which will reset all settings to the default (i.e. you'll need to go back to the Settings page and reset them if you had custom settings before now).
I just realised I messed up a little on this schedule and accidentally gave it an incomplete filename for the SCP Archives show—I fixed the schedule, but you'll need to do a hard refresh to fix the old version of the schedule stored by your browser. You only need to do that once, and only this week.
I also made a bunch of changes, but they're mostly invisible. The main difference you can see is over on the Links section, where I added a bunch of other radio stations (mostly from Neocities).
I fixed a minor bug with the personal primetime setting form and added more Quiet, Please shows:
That's definitively the end of that series—I've checked every episode, taken the ones I want on the station, and left the rest.
From LibriVox:
From SCP Archives:
The biggest update is the chatbox! Click the button in the bottom-right of the window to open the chatbox (and click the arrow icon beside the open chatbox to close it again). I might move it to the Call In section later.
The main other change is that I trimmed the HTML a bit to cut the number of nodes. I also double-checked the content notes in the Archive and cut a few that were redundant, trivial (e.g. things that only have tiny offhand mentions in the show), or about audio quality.
Every show in the Archive now has a link to the audio file on the server, so you can listen to anything in the station at any time.
I've also added a new series: Fifty-One Tales, a collection of short stories by Lord Dunsany, recorded for LibriVox! It's split into four parts, each about half an hour long.
I've added 6 more shows from a new OTR series, Dimension X, a 1950s series mostly made of adaptations of sci-fi short stories. Here's the first few shows I picked:
First, I didn't like how the look of the Cbox chatbox clashed with the look of the site, or how it messed with looping around the page using keyboard navigation. So, I removed it (it didn't get any traffic in the ~2 weeks it was up, anyway).
Second, I added another link at the bottom of the nav bar—a link that takes you to a random show (specifically, it takes you straight to the file, no chance to see the blurb etc.). It's super-simple and I might fix up the version I made that takes you to a show in the archive instead (but then I'll have to slightly change the way navigating between sections works, so…).
The new shows are all from Dimension X again:
I also fixed a problem with the primetime setting that made it display wrong on the top day on the Forecast at most hours of the day.
A combination of Dimension X shows:
And SCP Archives shows:
I also corrected the license for Dimension X and removed ad breaks from the SCP Archives shows (where ad breaks existed).
From Suspense:
And from a new series, The Black Mass, a 1960s anthology of fantasy and gothic and cosmic horror:
More SCP Archives shows:
Some more new shows from Black Mass:
And from LibriVox:
From Black Mass:
This brings the station past 200 shows! Just ~50 more to go for the rest of beta.
Up til now the Archive was written directly in the main HTML file, which wasn't a huge problem while there were few shows, but now there's hundreds of shows it's getting kinda unwieldy. As in, the code for it takes ~90 kB and many, many lines, and since HTML files aren't cached on your computer, your browser has to re-download the whole thing every time you visit the site.
To fix that, I shifted the whole Archive from the HTML file to the main script, which is cached. Changing the format also cut 25% of the data as a nice lil side-effect. From now on, when you visit the site, your browser'll already have the biggest chunk of the page loaded onto your computer (unless the Archive's been updated since you last visited).
I also added loading spinners to all the generated content before it's loaded in (so, the Forecast, Schedule, stats lists in the About page, a few in the landing page, and in the Archive).
From LibriVox, the mystery/cosmic horror novella The Great God Pan, split into 4 pairs of 2 chapters.
I also moved all the 2022 beta news posts to the News Archive (link below).
From Dimension X (probably the last I'll take from the whole series):
I also fixed an issue with the landing page display on non-mobile (or narrower tablet) screens.
From The Black Mass (the last I'm taking from the series):
Also fixed some problems introduced by pushing an update a few days ago and half-undoing it.
From Mindwebs:
From Mindwebs:
From SCP Archives (probably the last I'm taking from the series):
Fixed a little bug introduced by adding loading spinners all over the place to show where things were loading in. The bug happened if you were already on the page when the next week's schedule loaded; the script would look for loading spinners that'd already been removed from loading the first schedule, and when it couldn't find them it ground to a halt. That should be fixed now.
I also added the first significant new feature in a little while—the Archive now has a set of links at the top that scroll you to different series. It's slightly hacky (and you can't link to specific series, only to the top of the Archive), but it works fine. This might be the last major change I make to the app (outside of adding shows and expanding the schedule).
More LibriVox shows:
I've also added The White People, a short story of fey myth and ritual by Arthur Machen, split into 3 parts, and the first few stories from Robert W. Chambers' collection The King in Yellow, split into 7 parts. Both are from LibriVox.
This finally brings the total number of shows to 260, halfway to my final goal of 520! I might've said before that I wanted 250 shows by the end of beta, but 260 makes more sense at exactly 50%. Anyway, in a few weeks' time the schedules will get longer, from 4+6 shows to 8+8 shows (8 in the week, 8 on the weekend).
More LibriVox shows:
And more from Mindwebs:
More from LibriVox:
I also replaced Quiet, Please #43 with #106, the last episode in the series—a rebroadcast of #43.
I changed the audio links in the Archive from showing an Omega (Ω) to having the text “Listen”, which is longer (so slightly blocks some of the longer show titles), but way clearer about what the links do.
The new shows are from a mix of sources. From Quiet, Please:
From Lights Out:
And from Mindwebs:
New shows from Mindwebs:
And from LibriVox:
Starting with next week (not this week), schedules will have 2 extra shows on weekdays and another 2 on the weekend, for a total of 6 and 8. This is a test and I might go back on it later depending on how I feel about it. The weekend shows will also shift on different days like the weekday shows, so there'll be different shows at the same time on Saturdays and Sundays.
From The Magnus Archives:
From Mindwebs:
From a new source, Seeing Ear Theater, which was a 1997–2001 online radio play series of sci-fi adaptations and originals:
I also moved most of the news posts so far this year to the News Archive with everything from last year.
Finally, I've made a change to the scheduling so starting next week there'll be 5 shows in the weekday loop, not 6.
From LibriVox:
Also from LibriVox, but separated due to their length, is Algernon Blackwood's horror story The Willows in four parts, and the first section of Lord Dunsany's Pegāna myth cycle, The Gods of Pegāna, in 3 parts.
And from Seeing Ear Theater:
From a new source, the OTR series Macabre (probably the only episodes I'll be taking from the 8-episode series):
And from Seeing Ear Theater:
Back at the end of October I found and fixed a bug that messed with the Forecast if the week started in regular time and ended Daylight Saving Time. It was a quick fix that only resolved the issue going in that direction—and since this week has the shift from Daylight Saving Time to regular time in the UK, that meant the problem happened again.
I'm pretty sure the fix I just applied now resolves the issue in both directions.
From a new source, the radio series The Hall of Fantasy:
I also updated the filenames for all LibriVox selection shows and many Lights Out shows. I wouldn't have added this to the news if not for the fact that I had to double up the Archive entries for 2 Lights Out shows that're on this week's schedule (this week's schedule file uses the old Archive entries and files, so I need to wait til next week before I can delete them).
Firstly, I just fixed a problem with the DST Forecast-adjustment code (the problem it fixes only happens in weeks where you're moving to/from DST, so this shouldn't change anything obvious.
Secondly, I fixed a problem that only happened on older browser versions (more-or-less anything last updated before 2020) that don't support a certain newer javascript operator. This problem completely blocked the script from running. Now this should be fixed.
I've reverted the second set of changes in the last news post, because there are far more issues than just the few I found at first, including various other javascript and CSS problems. It turns out that 2020 is kind of a breakpoint where browser dev teams introduced a bunch of basic new features used on this site, and as a 1-person team I don't really want to maintain 2 separate versions of the script and stylesheet or actively make the code bulkier, weaker, and harder to read, so unfortunately I won't be supporting older browsers.
I've finished filling out the Pegāna cycle, adding the short story collection Time and the Gods (in 7 parts) and three other short stories, Idle Days on the Yann, A Shop in Go-By Street, and The Avenger of Perdóndaris. Actually, Idle Days on the Yann was already in the Archive in the LibriVox selection, so I've just moved that over to the Pegāna cycle (but I've kept the same numbering in the LibriVox selection, so there's a gap where that show used to be).
I also added the following from The Hall of Fantasy, probably the last I'll take from that series:
And in the LibriVox selection:
I've added a few new sources!
First, the sci-fi radio anthology X Minus One, with the following shows:
Second, Columbia Workshop, with the following shows:
And one show each from the following sources:
That's probably all I'm gonna take from each series. Finally, I've added some other new shows from a mix of existing sources.
From LibriVox:
From Lights Out:
From Suspense:
Now for the flipside: I removed the 40 Magnus Archives episodes that were in the archive because I'm slightly concerned about some kinda legal issue if anyone e.g. streams any of those episodes from Weird Waves on a platform like Twitch. I also removed various other shows from other series: many don't fit the station; some I just don't like as much as others; a few are plain bad with too few redeeming qualities; one or two just had too low sound quality.
Removed from The Black Mass:
Removed from Dimension X:
Removed from The Hall of Fantasy:
Removed from the LibriVox selection:
Removed from Lights Out:
Removed from Macabre:
Removed from Mindwebs:
Removed from Quiet, Please:
And removed from Suspense:
The only series I haven't checked yet is SCP Archives, which I'll go over when I start looking through the other of the two SCP-related podcasts I found.
In the Archive, I simplified the source/license notes for all sources (I'm not sure anyone uploading OTR series to the Internet Archive has legal or ethical grounds to slap any license on the material, so I'm not gonna reference them on this site), renumbered the remaining Hall of Fantasy shows, tweaked and shortened a bunch of show blurbs, and corrected a few minor mistakes caused by copying and pasting one show blurb to others.
Finally, I removed a few links to other online indie radio stations: Yesterweb Radio (taken down by its operators) and Radio Chupacabra (looks active but the radio widget doesn't work), and simplified and centre-aligned all the text in the Call In, Support, and Links sections.
So what's the new goal I mentioned in the heading? Since I cut a bunch of shows and won't be adding a bunch more shows from another big source with the same potential problem as The Magnus Archives (the horror fiction reading podcast PseudoPod), getting to 500 shows would be pretty much impossible without adding shows that either don't fit the station very well or are just mediocre (and I just got done cutting a load of shows that meet either of those criteria).
The new goal is 366 shows—1 for every day of the year (including leap years). I think this can probably be done with the sources I have left.
I added the following shows from new sources.
From the early-1980s Canadian horror series Nightfall:
From Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre (a.k.a. The Mercury Theater on the Air, which is a little too long for the Archive heading):
From Escape, a contemporary of Suspense:
From The Witch's Tale:
From the SCP Database:
And I added a few more from existing sources:
From Mindwebs:
From LibriVox:
As of now, every source in the Archive except the LibriVox selection is complete, in that I'm not gonna take more shows from them. The show count's at 322* of 366—the remainder's mostly gonna come from the OTR series Beyond Midnight, Theatre 5, The Mysterious Traveller, and The Weird Circle, plus excerpts from long horror stories on LibriVox (The Night Land, The House on the Borderland, and maybe The Purple Cloud).
*excluding 2 duplicate files that right now make the count read 324
I also removed a bunch more shows; this should be the last big swathe of cuts.
Removed from the LibriVox selection:
Removed from Lights Out:
Removed from Mindwebs:
Removed from Quiet, Please:
Removed from SCP Archives:
Removed from Suspense:
Removed from X Minus One:
Besides straight-up removing shows, I also combined three Seeing Ear Theater two-parters into single shows: Diary of a Mad God, Marilyn or the Monster, and Propagation of Light in a Vacuum. However, because that last show's on this week's schedule, I've had to keep the split files and Archive entries; they'll be deleted next week, when doing so won't mess with the schedule.
One non-show thing I did was replace the three raster image Weird Waves buttons (in the Links section) with a single 88×31px button and slightly updated the vector image button to match that size (it might take a little while before browsers un-cache the old vector button, since it uses the same name as the new one).
Finally, I shifted a bunch of earlier news posts to the News Archive.
Just a little update tidying up the duplicate shows I had to leave in the Archive during the big update last week because they were on that week's schedule, plus a few other similar changes that won't really be visible on the front end.
I added probably the last setting I'll add: You can now set the radio's position in widescreen view to be left (default) or right of the rest of the page content.
I also moved a few more news posts to the News Archive and gave the page a bit of an overhaul (re-ordered posts earliest to latest, put links to blog posts in the main post lists, gave all news posts consistent date formats, and a few other things).
New shows from a new source, the 1964–65 radio play revival Theater 5:
From the 1968–70 South African radio series Beyond Midnight:
From the 1943–52 mystery, suspense, and horror series The Mysterious Traveler:
From The Weird Circle, a 1943–45 series that adapted horror literature to radio:
That's probably all I'll be taking from those sources.
New show in Escape:
New shows in the LibriVox selection:
I also returned a few removed shows to the Archive:
There's a few other changes in the Archive, this time to series/source info: I've changed dates to be specific years instead of decade ranges and added first-published dates for LibriVox sources (other than the LibriVox selection).
I also added some advice for any streamers who might broadcast Weird Waves; it can be found in the About section.
Finally, I moved another post—the second of the two huge posts about removing shows—into the News Archive and added a new section there for old schedules, which lists them by name and date and links to the old files.
New shows from a new source, the short-lived 1950s short horror story-reading series Sleep No More:
From the very short-lived 1940s horror radio play anthology Dark Fantasy:
I've also added various readings of the works of Clark Ashton Smith under the heading “CASiana”:
That brings the total to 365 shows.
The total I'm aiming for is 366.
What's the last show?
Fittingly, it's linked to Quite, Please, the first source I added and the inspiration for making this site, and connected to me. The final show is a script reading, by me, of a lost episode of Quiet, Please:
That brings the total show count to 366; an arbitrary goal that means someone could listen to one show file every day of the year, even in a leap year, and never listen to the same show twice.
There'll be one final news post in gamma wrapping up any loose ends and explaining about what comes next for Weird Waves.
Finally, I checked over all the show links in the Archive and fixed a broken link (Dr. Grimshaw's Sanitorium).
The gamma phase is over. There are 366 shows in the Archive, meeting my semi-arbitrary goal, and I'm pretty much happy with where things are with the site's features and content. It feels weird to say, after almost a year of work, but it's done.
What comes next? There's a few more schedules lined up through to the week of the anniversary of regular broadcasts: a schedule all about art and performance next week and a schedule of just Quiet, Please shows for the week after to mark one year. After that… the weekly schedules will be going on hiatus. I wanna take a break from updates.
During the hiatus there'll still be a repeating weekly schedule in the radio—a much bigger schedule, in fact. It has 24 shows cycling during the week and 24 during the weekend! They're some of the best shows on the site, picked from as many sources as possible, though I had to cut my original list by half to fit it into the schedule. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I did when I first listened to them.
I'll still check in on the site on a regular basis to make sure it hasn't broken somehow, but after a few weeks from now I won't be making any kinda regular updates any more (and for the next few weeks the only changes I'll make are updating the RSS file).
Thank you to everyone who's checked out the site, listened in the Archive, and/or tuned into the radio so far! I've learnt a hell of a lot while making this site, and I'm really satisfied with how it turned out.
The links at the top of the Archive, which point to different series/sources, now transfer focus to the series when you click them (before, they'd scroll the series into view, but keyboard focus stayed with the list of links at the top—not super accessible for keyboard users).
Weird Waves' weekly scheduling is now going on hiatus for the near-mid future. There'll be a repeating hiatus schedule with 24 shows cycling on weekdays and another 24 cycling on weekends, but it'll be the same shows each week. Thank you to everyone who's listened so far!
For a little while I've been thinking about how to best use Weird Waves. From what I've seen of Neocities' limited analytics I know few people listen to shows, and at this point I've gotten what I wanted out of it as a learning exercise, so I've decided to change it to something that's useful for me right now: a more normal audio player, but for horror/sci-fi/fantasy audio instead of music.
The main reason for this is that I started streaming on twitch over the past few months and I want to be able to play Weird Waves during stream breaks or over the top of chill art streams, but in its fake-radio form the site's really not suited to that. So, the change.
Here's what I cut:
Here's what I reworked:
Here's what I added:
I've tested it in multiple common desktop browsers and everything seems to work and look right (aside from the seek bar in the radio being positioned slightly higher than I'd like in Chrome and Safari). I'm going to test it on-stream this week (here's my channel) and see how well it works, and start talking it up more later in the week or early next week if all goes well.
I've removed more shows from the site. That includes every show taken from Arch Oboler's Plays, Macabre, The White People, and the two SCP podcast series, as well as the following individual shows:
From Beyond Midnight:
From The Black Mass:
From Dimension X:
From The Hall of Fantasy:
From the LibriVox Selection:
From Lights Out:
From Mindwebs:
From Nightfall:
From Quiet, Please:
From Seeing Ear Theater:
From Suspense:
And from various other series:
That should be all the cuts I'm gonna make. I realised I should do them as early as possible to avoid breaking any playlists.
Both the main page and the News Archive use a utility script that updates the page style on pageload according to the settings you chose in Settings. I missed updating the News Archive's link to this script, so it wasn't updating when the settings changed. This is fixed now.
Just fixed a minor bug where, under certain circumstances, clicking the “Add series to playlist” button would update the playlist, but not the loaded show, even though the top show on the playlist changed. This is now fixed.
There's a new toggle in the Streaming advice section that, when switched on, excludes more-recent copyright material from the pool when you add a random show/banger or add the entire archive to the playlist. Specifically, it excludes CASiana, Mindwebs, Nightfall, and Seeing Ear Theater shows.
Subheadings (aside from section headings and headings in the radio and Archive) now have changed block margins for improved readability (the wide, even margins bugged me for a long time).
I've removed the “banger” tag from a number of shows in the archive (this is invisible and only affects whether or not it's possible to add them randomly with the “Add random banger” button).
I also added a few changes when you change the site theme: now the favicon files and the Weird Waves buttons at the bottom of the Links area change to match it.
I've added another stat to the list in the About section: the number of hours of audio in the Archive. At the moment, this is about 133 hours.
The per-series stats list now shows the total duration of the series in hours, not the number of shows per series, and is sorted from longest to shortest duration. For example, currently Mindwebs is at the top of the list with 19.4 hours, followed by Quiet, Please at 16.4 hours, then the LibriVox selection at 15.9 hours, and so on, down to The Black Chapel at 0.2 hours.
I've added back in the original series stats list, which was the show count per series, plus a button that lets you re-order the stats list from total hours to show count and back again.
I also corrected a typo in the archive entry for The Black Mass, which had the closing year listed as 1937 instead of 1967.
On the playlist, the first show's move-up button and last-show's move-down button are now fully disabled. Until now they could still be tabbed to or clicked (not ideal), but the script to move a show up or down wouldn't run if you tried to move something up or down off the ends of the list.
I made a few very minor tweaks over the last few days, but also one significant change: now there are buttons under each code-block in the Streaming section that copy the code to your clipboard when you click them (look for the “Copied” indicator).
The playlist controls (add show, add banger, shuffle, and clear) now appear on the left of the playlist and are sticky (so they stay in view as you scroll down the page), instead of being after the playlist (making it tedious to reach them).
I also cut a few more shows from the bangers list.
I just updated the site with a bunch of behind-the-scenes changes that mostly don't affect how it looks or acts from the front, but here're the bigger changes you can actually see:
You'll find old Weird Waves news posts here, split by time period, as well as links to blog posts I made about the site elsewhere.
Click each section for news from that era of the site.