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AustinMania! genesis

I’ve decided the site needs to have more community involvement right off the bat, instead of waiting until I can add reader comments to this blog. Plus, reader comments are fine, but I think I need something more Austin-specific, an area of the site that is dedicated to Austinitis in all it’s glory. So, I’ve made an AustinMania! page, where people can share what they think is cool about Austin. At least, that is the initial functionality, I will probably add more later.

The next question revolved around how visitors would access the new page. I am very happy with how the Nav blobs look and work, so I didn’t want to add another one for this - it would throw off the whole symmetry! Since I had already decided there would be areas of the site not directly accessible from the Nav Blobs (such as the terms page, and the whole pixel purchasing process), this was ok, but the question remained: how and from where would I link to it?

In the end, I decided to hide the page and make a game of finding it, sort of like a puzzle, a bonus for those who chose to play. Yes, this is risky, but then again, this whole site is a grand experiment. The challenge then was to design a puzzle that was fairly easy, yet not obvious - plus of course, I still needed to devise and implement the solution.

Making this happen was fairly fun, but it ate up time, and the site didn’t launch this weekend.