the 4th month of the website has been all the riot and fun i was anticipating the month to be. September i took a week or so away and a moment to collect my thoughts. it was much needed after a few months of burning out. this month has been cashing in to those thoughts for changes. and it has been a lot of work and a blast! me and Sago have been hard at work on the back end of the site improving its functionality and feel and look. i may have mentioned this before, but how the site looked 5 months ago to now is literal day and night. the site just has a cool feel it now, and a capable one at that. content for the site has been easier to produce, easier to promote, easier to enact, easier to think up and find. personally, i may not be a great writer by any means, but i think i’m definitely a groove. even if it’s only a step forward, it’s still a step. reps always count. the Autumn Edition is now live. a great December feature is coming as well. but i won’t i spoil it yet.
i added the ability to search the site by genre or rating! go to “lists” part of the site to search further. this part of the site will age well as the site goes on. a more intentional way to dig through the catalog of reviews and music visited on the site. this is the first realization of that promise. i like how it’s looking already.
i took off the “Discover” section of the site. it IS a very important part of the site, but i just haven’t nailed what i want it to be and feature yet. very soon i think. after new years anyways.
it may be small numbers but the site visits have gone up by 500%! as well, it’s been top on some google searches for major artists. it felt like a celebration, proving the site’s ability to reach, even at such young age. i’m very pleased.
no Hikaru Utada review this month, maybe next month.
The Autumn Edition was a way to do what i did with The Summer Edition, but a bit more truncated and more manageable. i def pulled out some hair for the summer version. lots of healthy steep learning curves… The Autumn Edition is a way to drop 8 reviews of music i’ve come to love over the past decade or so, into a fall-type atmosphere. i thought book format was kind of cool. like reading a cozy book by candles or fire under a blanket (that’s what i’ve been doing this season). The Golden Hour was for all those gorgeous evenings i’ve spent at Snow Bowl, Flagstaff for pre-winter. great cold weather, short days, shorter sunset, golden colors in in the grass trees and sky. i always thought of those times as the best parts of autumn, right before the sunset. so i wanted to review music that reflected this. The Cold Front was a great idea to dip in to the darker creepier, more desolate areas of late fall. on the drive home from Snow Bowl was always a bit more haunted and dangerous feeling. that is until reaching my favorite spot for pizza and beer after. that contrast between the night’s winter cold and the warm places we find to get away inspired this section. i like the feel and look of it. it’s less of a to-do than the summer version, but i’m quite happy how it turned out. also blasting 8 reviews in 2 weeks is pretty cool. i named it Vol. 2 because when i started i the site i was making home made magazine about the site. Vol. 0 was the site launch. so i wanted to continue that vague tradition.
i reworked a lot of the SEO for the site, it should help more with site discovery. almost drastically.
the site has had more reviews, features, and views this past month than any past month. which is a huge deal! November will be a bit more quiet as we focus on the December Feature. and December will be more laid back as the Feature fills most of the month, however small reviews here and there are meant to show.
The December Feature will be a treat for sure! we will be breaking down all the best music of the site both personally and by score. it will be a great way to talk about the music that excited us most and how we felt about them. which is honestly the most fun chance to talk about music in general. very excited.
you may not notice it, but i went through almost 6,000 lines of code to tune up and refine the site for suture expansion! and i have some really exciting ideas coming up soon.
get excited for the end of the year Feature and get even more excited for new expansions on the site! the site has been moving along much faster than i had initially anticipated. i tell people im almost a year ahead of schedule, but i mean it! the site has already achiever more than 50 reviews and features, and i only wanted 100 for the year in total. the visual language and fidelity of the site have also gone far beyond initial intentions. when i think of that all white, bare-bones, site compared to the now all black, and colorful, version, well i get goosebumps. it’s a combination of the site coming along and the exploration and discussion over great music. something about it just gets me even more excited about the future of the site. and i mean it! what excites me even more is that these posts are getting even more difficult to write for. but that’s how things go. as the site comes in to a groove, it finds an equilibrium, a normality in it’s progress.
sincerely,
Marcus Landeros
Editor-in-Chief, The Sagasu Review
currently listening: Hitsujibungaku — Keep Walking
