I’ve always been enamoured with the idea of the website as a living, breathing place; not just a dumb, static object, like a book or a reel of film, but, well, a site, like an ancient oak that bears the scars of all who’ve scrawled their loved ones’ initials on it.

For The Satyrs’ Forest, i’ve been slacking on that ideal. Sure, we have our annual tradition, and i’d change the theme to be more orange in autumn sometimes if i could be bothered, but never anything automatic — something that could outlive me if i dropped dead tomorrow. (Continuing with the forest metaphor, i’d toyed with the idea of a series of annual rings that would grow into different shapes depending on how active i was in updating the site, but quickly realised that my database just wasn’t set up to support that kind of thing.)

I had the itch to tinker with the home page’s design anyway, so i decided to finally implement something to solidly ground this site in the real world: seasonal themes! In daytime, there are four themes, one each for spring, summer, autumn, and winter, which shift throughout the year like an actual forest. There are also three complementing darker themes (spring and summer share one) which activate when it’s night here in Northumbria. That last part was important to me: i wanted the Forest to be like a real place, one that could, of course, be nowhere else but the actual location of the server, not just an ætherial construct where “night” happens whenever it’s past six on the viewer’s clock.

Finally, for the real old-heads, the “Modus anciens” theme replicates the look of the site as it appeared in 2020, when i was just starting out. I’ve always loved those neon purples, even if they don’t fit the arboreal metaphor, and it’s a joy to bring them back.