I made a draft of this a couple weeks back and definitely hit save, but then it was lost. I say that because apropos of where I am with the website and In Extremis lately. In a post about wanting to have a more concise website, this is probably going to be one of my longer posts. There’s a few points I want to make here, and it’s reminiscent of a few years back when I was getting burned out on making website and social media posts every week. It’s not that, but a similar level of restructuring is the goal. Here’s what I want to talk about in this post:
- How the site is/was organized (for posterity?)
- How I want to organize the site going forward
- The mess of getting to where I want to be
- Why I even want to do this
Where we’ve been
The website has been more-or-less functioning as a kind of wiki and that’s predominantly what I want to change. Most of the website flowed from the Lore page and that’s not to say it will be different, but a big focus was on information. Here’s a simplified version of the hierarchy:
- Lore
- Books
- Factions
- Fauna
- History
- Immortals
- Items
- Locations
- Omneuttians
All of these categories had articles within them, so if you were looking for one piece of information, it could have turned into a rabbit hole. And that’s fine, but not quite what I want to do here. At least, not going forward. Some of this organization didn’t make any sense either. Where does an omneuttian who wasn’t born immortal but is believed to have ascended to that status go—what sub-category do they fall under? Would it make more sense for items used by particular omneuttians or even factions make more sense on those pages? Should cities on planet-stars in a region of a species’ space have a much longer URL than a planet-star or star-planet not in the defined region?
With everything trying to be information-based, a lot of these pages were modeled after or designed in the vein of wiki-articles from Wikipedia (of course), in addition to game and movie wikis, since there’s not a whole lot of other direct comparisons to In Extremis. But a lot of these articles didn’t have a ton of information to pull from, so some were quite short, with only a reference or two, and some were quite long with seven or even ten references! But I’m not really sure the information that made it to these pages was interesting, engaging, or even relevant to why you’d come to the website in the first place.
It was just there.
And then there were the plot-arcs, the story groupings of In Extremis, which were pages made to the side and linked back to everything else. You might already be guessing where this is going.
A more focused future
I want to move to a future as soon as possible where the main point of the website is to make it as easy as possible for you (the readers) to get to the story. That’s the point of the site in the future of my mind. People come to the site to read the stories, and if interested and/or curious, there’s lots of small hidden details to find by poking around the other lore books, the articles, etc.
If you’re reading a story and come across a character, faction, animal, or location you’re unfamiliar with you should be able to open up another page and find it. If you have a question, you should be able to open up another tab and find the answer, or maybe even more. Or maybe not—not everyone can know everything, right?
I want the stories to be first and foremost on the website: easy to find, easy to read, easy to keep track of.
Pardon the mess
Why shouldn’t the website be focused around the stories I want to tell?
It should be, and to be forthright while I was very invested for the majority of the last decade in storytelling (the main reason I made In Extremis to begin with), I’ve been a little obsessed with worldbuilding for the last few years. It was needed, why the Ajikah was created, and why I still even kept the idea of an in-universe writing avatar with Kaniovac. But my mind has changed on how I want to discover and explore this world.
Story first.
Getting there will be messy. I’ve already made some new formatting changes (check out the Lore or Books pages) and things will roll out slowly. I’ve got page templates that are almost finalized as of the time of writing, so if you’re poking around you might see some changes. Pages are going to be deleted, some new ones made, things like that.
I’m not sure if the new pages will be linked immediately, but I won’t delete anything – pages, artwork, links – until the replacement is up and running. Speaking of artwork, I know at least 130 new headers need to be made, and all the animal artwork needs to be redone. As of writing I do need to figure out a couple of organizational elements but things are largely moving forward.
The biggest element to be decided at this point is do I make this rework into an Expedition. For me, that designation means that I have a story to tell, and art, lore/writing, and music to make that happen. If I decide to go forward with an Expedition, it’ll be here of course.
If you haven’t seen elsewhere on the internet, I’ve migrated from twitter to BlueSky and no longer post on instagram, so the two most reliable places to find me are the aforementioned BlueSky and Twitch, where I stream a few times a week. Some of the new art for the website I’ll be posting on BlueSky or creating live on Twitch, so if you have an account at either or both of those sites, feel free to give me a follow.
The why of it all
This is the TL;DR part I suppose. If you haven’t read between the lines on the other three sections, it’s more work than I want to be doing to make long in-depth articles for every little detail of the In Extremis universe.
Making the art and music and stories takes enough time as it is, so I’m consolidating even further. Less pages to keep track of and cross reference so I can spend more time making art and music and stories. I’ve been doing that more and the website has been quite neglected but I like the amount of time I’m spending creating, so I’m updating the website so I don’t have to feel like it’s neglected.
Thanks for reading :)
Skeli'n Studios 