The Secret Loft
The Secret Loft website screenshot montage
The Secret Loft is a new website and project launched by local, Joleen Gavey and released on Tuesday March 16th. The locally unique website presents original, diverse short fiction stories. The stories are broken up into chapters and released separately so you only read a chapter per each book update – That is of course if you start from the time the first chapter is released. The idea reminds me a bit of episodic content which has been proven to be successful in mediums like video games and television.
The site is designed and developed by husband, Derek Gavey. Upon launch, the first chapter of “In My Solitude” was released.
A little bit more about Joleen:
I only started writing fiction about a year ago. It’s kind of a new thing. I say “kind of”, because I’ve always written things down, scribbled on scraps of paper, in notebooks.
The stories featured in the Secret Loft are about other people. Most of them are people I’ve never met. All of these people have their own secrets, but they also have some stories to share. So, this website is dedicated to presenting them in an accessible, beautiful way. It has already been a very interesting process. I hope that the stories prove a worthwhile diversion from reality; no one should have to spend too much time there.
The first thing I noticed (being a web designer and developer) is that the site uses cutting edge CSS3 techniques as well as tons of transparency which means low support for older browsers, like the dreaded IE6, and if you ask Derek, his response (via a Twitter post on the subject), “This site is totally broken in IE6 too, on purpose.” taking the no-support-on-purpose route to progress web technology forward. A hard thing thing to strive for locally; I must say, personally, witnessing the amount of old computers sitting in tons of businesses and homes here.
March 18th, 2010 at 1:36 PM
derek says:
Thanks for the post, we appreciate it. Further to the IE6 thing, so far only 1% of our visits have been from IE6 users. So were not leaving too many behind yet. Also interesting a full 5% of our users visited via an iPhone. I take this as a sign I should be developing for the future not the past.
March 18th, 2010 at 1:47 PM
Vaughn says:
No problem, I would love to write about it some more in the future once there is perhaps a full book published eventually. The 1%-5% split is also good to hear. Here on Medicine Hat Media we get around 5% IE6, which equates to 220+ separate people a month for us – so we can’t follow suit quite yet 🙂 (not that I try overly hard to support IE6 with the current layout anyways)