This covers the alpha period, July to the start of October in 2022. That includes a few blog posts I wrote about the project (links at the bottom of this list).
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?
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.
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.
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).
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:
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).
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…
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 menu 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'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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are the three blog posts I wrote about Weird Waves during alpha:
This covers the beta period, October 2022 to early February 2023. That includes a few blog posts I wrote about the project (links at the bottom of this list).
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).
From SCP Archives (probably the last I'm taking from the series):
From Mindwebs:
From Mindwebs:
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 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 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).
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 Black Mass:
This brings the station past 200 shows! Just ~50 more to go for the rest of beta.
Some more new shows from Black Mass:
And from LibriVox:
More SCP Archives shows:
From Suspense:
And from a new series, The Black Mass, a 1960s anthology of fantasy and gothic and cosmic horror:
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).
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 menu—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.
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:
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.
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.
From LibriVox:
From SCP Archives:
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.
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).
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'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.
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).
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
Here's the blog post I wrote about Weird Waves during beta in 2022:
This covers the gamma period, starting early February 2023.
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.
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:
More from LibriVox:
I also replaced Quiet, Please #43 with #106, the last episode in the series—a rebroadcast of #43.
More LibriVox shows:
And more from Mindwebs:
You'll find old Weird Waves news posts here, split by time period, as well as links to blog posts and social media threads I made about the site elsewhere.
I move old news here because it's the only section of the main HTML file that grows over time (the Archives also grow when I add shows, but that's javascript data, so it's cached by your browser).
Click each section for news from that era of the site.