Updated 3 years ago
https://tranceam.org/brainmachines/index.html
This is also reachable under “Trance” in the menu on the main site.
Preserving the past is important, especially lost momentous eras, and I can’t think of a more momentous era than New York in the late 90s – early 2000s.
The original site was labyrinthine in part to preserve privacy and partly because I really didn’t know what I was doing. Rather than clean my room/HTML, I just moved to a different room/section.
The old pages I had made using a combination of NEtObjects Fusion, Microsoft Front Page, SHTML/DHTML and some early 2000s PHP, had been sitting on my server 20 years.
The Wayback Machine, given the site’s structure, didn’t do it justice at all.
I finally decided to go in and clean everything up and make it the way I always wanted to, back in the day but this time using modern WordPress.
One large readable page, with all links to all the site’s trance pages I had back then. No funny back roads, Easter Eggs, or secret places – which by themselves are great ideas but have to be cohesively built from the ground up, NOT mixed with functional content as a halfass “security” measure.
This is for desktop users only, ideally a large monitor at least 1920×1080. I really wanted that mega menu – it was a central design decision that hit so many birds with one stone.
It’s still technically viewable on mobile but kind of painful. We didn’t have mobile back then anyway.
It was a delicate balance to preserve the original look and feel and infuse it with future proofed modern technology but I’m happy with the results.
It was a lot to sift through. After a couple weeks of painstaking editing, I had removed:
-subscription buttons
-most of the annoying wav’s
-forums
-the wav player
-link pages
-deprecated
-photo galleries (except for the bridge because why not), …because those are all on the main site now.
I reorganized the history to be more clear.
I moved almost all the non-psytrance pages (brainmachines, drugs etc) into the main site under “90s Neurotech” and “Shamanism” and reformatted all those as well.
I kept most of the hyperlinks that probably go nowhere for historical reasons.
I decided against adding a lot of newer technologies such as Youtube, and music, because the main site does that anyway and better.
This probably won’t need an edit ever again. The only thing left undone is to write a retrospective for those that weren’t there, and that will be on the main site.
Thanks everyone for staying in touch. Let’s make the 20s look like the 90s and the 60s.
