Welcome to the new fridg3.org!
I've redone the website. From SCRATCH. Let's talk about what's changed, and all the new cool stuff you can do!
2026-01-03
Welp, it's happened again. I've made the spontaneous decision to completely overhaul the entire website once more. Everything has been completely built from the ground up, and the way the website works has been redone to be more modular and easy to work with, both from a user and a developer point of view.So, as you can see, the place looks completely different. If you were around in fridg3.org's infancy days, you'll realize that this site style closely resembles what it looked like back then! I've always adored that style, and honestly the feedback on people thinking it was better kinda got to me after a while, so here we are with an easier-to-maintain version.
This rework focuses on the flaws of what made both versions of the site annoying to work with:
- version 1 was hard to work with due to the ASCII elements
- version 2 was difficult to apply updates to multiple pages at once
So over the past week, I've developed a version of the website that addresses both of these issues by using margins for styling instead of raw ASCII (excluding ascii art, obviously) and reworking the way pages load by using a page with the sidebar as a template, and then rendering everything on top of it. It's a modular system that means I can bulk update every page by changing a single line.
Now of course, I am a firm believer of online preservation. You can still find an old copy of the website in this github repository, which also includes a Google Drive link containing everything that doesn't get pushed to the repository.
What's changed?
It's naturally difficult to list EVERY change in the usual "updates" format, so I'll go through every major page and explain what's different. If there's something I haven't explained that you'd like to learn more about, check out the GitHub repository for the website and have a look around yourself./feed/
The feed is here to replace the microblog. Posts are stored in text files, and then displayed in a paginated list. There are a few upgrades compared to the microblog, such as styling support and multiple images support, and there will be a few new people given access to posting on it, so expect to see some new faces./journal/
The journal is a merging of the blog and the projects page from the old website. You're viewing a journal post right now!/email/
Just a basic form for sending me an email, complete with a maths question to block out some basic spam techniques./guestbook/
At the time of writing, the guestbook hasn't actually been implemented yet because it's very complex, and I'd like to take a bit of a break from developing the website before working on it. It needs to be entirely rewritten to work with this website, but it's likely I'll try and use some sort of IRC based system for it./music/
The music page works entirely differently. Songs do not have their own pages, but clicking on a song or album will open it in a music player that'll keep playing as you explore the website. You can download tracks by clicking on the mini album art on the player in the sidebar while a song is playing./gallery/
An index of every image uploaded onto the website. Unlike the older versions, every image is stored in a single directory for ease of organization, so I decided to make a gallery page to list this directory's contents. Images will be ordered from newest to oldest./merch/
Merchandise page. The old website had this, but it wasn't as easily accessible. This merch page sorts things into clothing and physical media groups. Check out the new "music for the in-between" vinyl and CD!/saves/
You might've noticed that feed and journal posts have a little bookmark icon. Clicking this will save the post to this page, so you can easily find content you like later!/settings/
Configure the website to your liking. We've had to remove themes, so instead you can now change the different colours of the website yourself in this page! You can also add a glow to text if you'd like. There's more to come to this page, keep an eye!And on the user-end, that's about it!
There's a LOT more going on in the back-end that makes this website work the way it does, and it's taken me over a week of working all day every day to get this version of the site to where it is now. If you like what you see and want to show gratitude, you can write me an email or even buy some of my merch!Thank you all for reading and sticking along, I hope you enjoy the new user experience :)
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