A message from the future
Most of this email was written on the long (but not that long) flight from Vancouver to Japan. Then the in flight wifi started to fail, so I forgot to queue it up to send. Better late than never. If you'll be at RubyKaigi this week, please say hello.
On Monday, we launched a new site for the record label Thrill Jockey. Their previous site was on an ancient version of Spree. It was sorely in need of an update.
Admittedly, I had an ulterior motive in taking on this project; I love the label. I’m a fan of many of their bands: Sumac, The Body, BIG|BRAVE, Lightning Bolt, Liturgy, among others. The Body (with Uniform) was actually the last live show I saw in 2020, under the looming shadow of the pandemic.
On top of all the less glamourous modernization features, Bettina Richards, the founder of Thrill Jockey, wanted customers to be able to listen to albums while they browsed. They had a media player on their existing site, but she wanted one that persisted across pages and matched their brand. This was a breeze with Turbo. A single attribute on the player element was all we needed to make it work.
Shops like this one sit in an interesting place in the world of digital commerce. They’re not at the scale where Solidus typically beats Shopify in total cost of ownership. They were, however, in need of some highly specific custom features that would be difficult to build on top of Shopify. (Read: impossible without custom apps.) Instead, we were able to build them into their platform, instead of on top of it.
By choosing Solidus, they ended up with a site that's deeply integrated into their existing processes, where they own their own data, and without any platform fees.
I spent the flight to Japan working through my "to listen" pile, a playlist that's almost 30 hours long at this point. The standout record from the flight was Dawnwalker’s The Between. I hadn’t checked in with Dawnwalker since House of Sand, which didn’t click with me. Apparently this is their second full-length since then. I’ll have to check out the other.
The Between is some proggy shit, in a good way. It’s a single thirty-two minute track featuring everything from New Age spoken word to shrieked vocals over doom riffs to blackened death passages. It’s going to take a few more listens for me to unpack, but I feel like it’ll be worth it.
