“So, I’m going home
To the place where I belong”
Daughtry – Home
Project Icon: The story behind why I built the blog I couldn’t find. I really thought I was going to make a few changes, which is probably the funniest possible way to start this, considering what you’re looking at now.
Recently, Jetpack did one of its rebuilds of the critical CSS and HTML on my site. When it finished, the performance grade came back as a C on desktop and a D on mobile. It didn’t hurt my feelings. I’ve been doing this long enough that a letter grade from a computer isn’t going to send me into an existential crisis, but it did make me think about something I probably hadn’t thought enough about before: the people actually trying to read this thing.
I’ve been blogging for a very long time, and Second Life blogging has changed tremendously during that time. There are a lot of incredible photographers creating incredible work, but a lot of “blogging” now is essentially a photograph followed by credits. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It just isn’t what I do.
I still write. Sometimes I write a little, and sometimes I apparently decide we’re going to discuss the entire history of a band and nobody is allowed to leave until I’ve covered every album, side project, concert memory, and questionable decision I’ve made since approximately 2001. I like words. I like telling stories, and I like explaining why a photograph exists instead of only showing you the photograph.
Music is woven through almost everything I do. Second Life is obviously a massive part of it. Sometimes I’m talking about fashion. Sometimes I’m talking about relationships, memories, basketball, concerts, people I’ve lost, people I love, completely ridiculous things, or whatever happens to be rattling around in my head. The blog has always been the place where all of those things are allowed to coexist.
If I was going to keep asking people to actually read it, I decided the experience of reading it needed to be better. That was the beginning of what eventually became Project Icon.
“I’ll Just Fix a Few Things”
The original plan really wasn’t to rebuild the entire website. I wanted it faster, I wanted mobile to be better, and there were some things about the old setup that had bothered me for a while. I figured this was finally a good excuse to clean them up.
The problem with fixing one thing is that you immediately notice the thing sitting next to it. Then you fix that, which makes something else suddenly look fifteen years old. You change that too, discover something underneath it that has been held together through several generations of WordPress and pure optimism, and eventually you’re staring at a completely rebuilt website wondering how “let’s improve the performance a little” turned into this.
At some point, rebuilding it properly made more sense than continuing to patch something that was never really designed for the way I use it. There was also a point where I realized I was no longer trying to improve the old site. I was designing an entirely new one while keeping everything I still loved about the place I’d already built.
That became the idea behind Project Icon. I didn’t want to find another generic blog theme and force Lucky Spiritor into it. I wanted to build the new LuckySpiritor.Com. That changed everything.
A Second Life Blog First
There are approximately seventeen billion WordPress themes available, and plenty of them are beautiful. They’re built for fashion bloggers, food bloggers, travel sites, magazines, businesses, portfolios, photography sites, and personal journals.
They’re also designed to work for everybody. I didn’t want that anymore.
I wanted something designed around the strange combination of things that actually happen here. A Second Life photograph might need to be the centerpiece of a post, while the styling credits underneath it could contain twenty different creators, events, and locations. A normal post might only be a few paragraphs, while a For The Record post might be long enough that you should probably pack snacks.
There are sponsors, events, avatar basics, directories, music, social platforms, and more than fourteen years of old posts that still need to work. All of that has to make sense on a desktop monitor, a tablet, and the phone somebody is probably holding with one hand while pretending they’re paying attention to something else.
Project Icon was built around those realities instead of treating them as problems that needed to fit inside somebody else’s template. It was built as a Second Life blog first.
That sounds obvious until you actually try finding a WordPress theme designed specifically for a Second Life blogger. There really isn’t one. WordPress doesn’t know that a pair of pants might need a SLURL, that something might only be available at an event, that an avatar has a head, body, skin, shape, hairbase, and approximately 600 other things attached to it before I’ve even put clothes on, or that “credits” can be an entire ecosystem of their own.
So instead of constantly translating Second Life into a normal blogging system, Project Icon started teaching the blog how Second Life actually works. That distinction ended up influencing almost everything.
The Homepage
The homepage was one place where I knew I didn’t want to throw everything away simply because I was rebuilding it. I liked the visual grid of the old site. Photography has always been the first thing you see when you arrive here, and I wanted to keep that.
So the spirit of that stayed.
The difference is everything happening underneath it. The homepage continuously loads more posts as you move through it, letting the photography remain the focus while the layout actually responds to the screen you’re using instead of simply becoming a squished version of the desktop site.
The navigation itself got a pretty serious overhaul too. It stays with you as you move through the site; the dropdowns were rebuilt, search lives right there with everything else, and the whole thing was designed to make getting somewhere else ridiculously easy without taking over the screen. There are a lot more doors into this site than there used to be, but hopefully considerably fewer moments of wondering which one you’re supposed to open.
That became especially important once Project Icon started adding more specialized areas. The menu isn’t just there to get you from Home to About anymore. It’s really the backbone connecting all of these different parts of LuckySpiritor.Com without making the site feel like it needs an instruction manual.
That endless loading was especially important to me because this site has a ridiculous archive. I didn’t want browsing it to constantly feel like turning pages in a filing cabinet. You can just keep going, which is either a wonderful way to explore fourteen years of posts or a very efficient way to lose an afternoon.
You’re welcome. If you’ve been here before, I wanted the homepage to still feel familiar. I didn’t want someone who has followed the blog for years to arrive and wonder where the hell they were. I just didn’t want it to feel old anymore.
A Site You Can Actually Explore
One of the bigger ideas behind Project Icon was that the homepage shouldn’t be the only real starting point anymore. That’s where the New To Second Life Hub comes in.
The New To Second Life Hub is essentially another front door into LuckySpiritor.Com, except instead of immediately dropping you into whatever I posted most recently, it’s built around helping you decide what you actually want to explore. With more than fourteen years sitting here, chronological order isn’t always the most interesting way through it.
Maybe you’re here for Second Life. Maybe you want the music stuff. Maybe you’re interested in the photography, the personal writing, or one of the increasingly strange corners this site has accumulated over the years. The New To Second Life Hub gives all of that somewhere to live without asking you to understand how I’ve organized fourteen years of my brain first.
I really like that distinction. The homepage tells you what’s happening now. The New To Second Life Hub helps you figure out where you want to go next. And if making a decision sounds exhausting, I’ve apparently accounted for commitment issues too. We’ll get to that.
The Posts Are Actually Built for Reading
This is probably where Project Icon became much more than a visual redesign for me.
The normal post template was rebuilt around the photograph and the story. The featured image gets the space it deserves, the title becomes part of that presentation, and everything underneath it is cleaner and easier to follow. Links are easier to identify, tags make more sense, author information has an actual home, and sharing doesn’t feel like somebody dumped a box of social media buttons onto the bottom of the page.
Even the opening of a post was reconsidered. The featured image isn’t just sitting above everything because that’s where WordPress traditionally puts it. It becomes the introduction. The photograph fills the space, the title lives with it, and the little arrow underneath basically says, “Yes, Lucky wrote something again. Keep scrolling.” I’m paraphrasing the arrow.
Once you get into the actual post, the design gets quieter. That’s intentional. There are plenty of things happening around the site, but once somebody starts reading, I want the words and photographs to take over.
That doesn’t mean everything useful disappeared either. The post sidebar still gives music and sharing their own space without making them compete with the actual story. Spotify can sit alongside the post when it belongs there, sharing is available when you want it, and the main reading area gets to remain exactly that: a place to read.
That balance became important throughout Project Icon. I didn’t want “cleaner” to mean stripping away everything useful until the site was just text floating in an empty white box. I wanted the extra stuff to know when to shut up.
Then there are the credits. If you blog Second Life, you already understand why that deserves its own conversation. Credits are one of those things normal blogging themes technically can display, but they’re rarely designed around what Second Life bloggers actually do with them. Sometimes they’re short. Sometimes they’re enormous. They contain creators, stores, events, poses, locations, and all kinds of other information that matters to the person who saw something in a photograph and wants to know where it came from.
Project Icon treats credits as part of the post instead of an awkward blob of text shoved underneath it because there was nowhere else to put them. There is even a Credits Library behind the scenes now, because apparently at some point during this project I decided rebuilding the same pieces of information forever was no longer an acceptable use of my life.
And the Credits Library isn’t just there to make the finished post prettier. It changes how I actually build posts. Things I use repeatedly can live in one place instead of being recreated over and over again. That means fewer mistakes, easier updates, and considerably less time spent wondering whether I’ve typed the same store landmark correctly for the 147th time.
That is the kind of feature nobody reading the blog necessarily needs to know exists, but you’ll benefit from it every time it quietly does its job. The important part is that none of it gets in the way of the writing. That’s the entire point.
Then There’s For The Record…
This might be my favorite example of why building the site specifically around what I do mattered. For The Record doesn’t behave like a normal blog post because those posts aren’t normal blog posts. They’re monsters.
Once I started writing deeper music pieces, it became obvious pretty quickly that dropping thousands and thousands of words into a regular blog template and wishing everyone luck wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of web design. If I’m going to write something that long, I should at least make it possible for somebody to navigate the damn thing. So For The Record got its own experience.
There is dedicated section navigation that stays available as you move through the article, making it possible to jump around without endlessly scrolling and trying to remember whether the thing you wanted was 2,000 or 12,000 words ago. There is reading progress, so you have some idea of just how deep into the rabbit hole you’ve made it, and the entire system changes on smaller screens so it doesn’t consume half of your phone.
More importantly, that template means I don’t have to compromise what I want For The Record to be just because traditional blog layouts weren’t made for it. If I want to spend thousands of words going album by album through someone’s career, the site can accommodate that. If I want to divide something into eras, concerts, side projects, or whatever other completely reasonable excuse I’ve found to write another 5,000 words, I can.
The website adapts to the writing instead of the writing adapting to the website. That might be one of my favorite things about Project Icon. It is basically a template built specifically around the fact that I have absolutely no intention of learning how to shut up about music. I consider that a feature.
Finding Fourteen Years of Stuff
One of the problems with blogging this long is that eventually you realize you’ve created your own archaeological site. There is a LOT here. Categories, post styles, years of photography, music posts, Second Life stories, personal writing, and things I posted long enough ago that sometimes even I find them and think, “Oh yeah, I did that.”
So navigation wasn’t only about making the menu prettier. The directory and index parts of the site were cleaned up too, because having fourteen years of content isn’t particularly useful if the only practical way to find something is remembering the exact title I gave it in 2017.
Then there is Surprise Me, which might be my favorite solution to the completely reasonable question of, “What the hell am I supposed to do with fourteen years of this?” Instead of searching for something specific, you can let the site pick for you and get dropped into a random post from somewhere in the archive. It could be something from last month or something I wrote a decade ago and have absolutely no memory of until you find it.
I love that because not everything needs to be discovered through a category, search box, or carefully organized directory. Sometimes you can just open a door and see where it takes you. With fourteen years of posts sitting here, Surprise Me basically turns the archive into a very large Lucky Spiritor roulette wheel.
Good luck. 🍀
The more organized side of me still gets plenty to play with too. The directory and index pages were rebuilt so they can actually function as destinations instead of glorified lists of links. They keep the visual language of the rest of the site, including the photography and sidebar where they belong, but they’re designed around browsing first.
That’s something Project Icon does all over the place now. A directory is allowed to be a directory. A calendar is allowed to be a calendar. A giant music article is allowed to become its own small country. They still look like they belong to LuckySpiritor.Com, but they don’t all have to pretend they’re the same kind of page.
Search got more attention for the same reason. It has a proper place in the navigation now; the results actually feel like part of the site, and even those little dead ends were treated like something worth designing. That includes the 404 page, because apparently I reached the stage of Project Icon where I had opinions about how people should experience a page that doesn’t exist. Instead of basically shrugging and wishing you the best, it gives you somewhere useful to go. That’s when you know you’ve gone too far. Or exactly far enough. I’m choosing the second one.
The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar became way cooler than I originally expected. Instead of a tiny calendar shoved somewhere into a sidebar, events now have an actual home on the site. The calendar is larger, easier to navigate, and finally has room to be something more useful than a little square with a number inside it.
Events can actually breathe now. Instead of cramming everything into the initial calendar view, information can expand when you want it, which means the calendar can stay readable without sacrificing the details that make it useful. It feels much closer to an actual Second Life resource now instead of a WordPress calendar that happened to wander onto a Second Life blog.
It’s also something I can continue building on as the site grows. The point wasn’t simply to make the calendar bigger. It was to give events a system that finally had room to become useful.
That matters because events are such a huge part of the ecosystem around Second Life blogging. I’m constantly talking about where something came from, what event it’s available at, when something opens, or where somebody needs to go.
If this site is going to be built around Second Life, having a useful way to showcase those events makes a hell of a lot more sense than treating them like an afterthought.
It also happens to be the page that decided during testing that the header and footer rules followed by literally everything else on the website did not apply to it. Apparently the Events Calendar wanted creative control. It did not receive it.
Sponsors Finally Have a Proper Home
My sponsors are part of what allows me to create what I create, and I wanted their presence here to feel intentional too.
The Sponsors page was completely rebuilt into its own directory instead of simply being somewhere to put a collection of logos. Each sponsor can have information about the brand, store locations, websites, social links, and how long I’ve been working with them.
These are creators and brands I actually have relationships with. I wanted the page to feel more like that and less like an advertising wall.
It also means someone discovering a creator through one of my posts has somewhere useful to go if they want to learn more. That’s a recurring theme throughout Project Icon. Information shouldn’t only exist. It should lead somewhere.
Lucky’s Basics, Mackenzie’s Basics and Cori’s Basics
This was another idea that started fairly small and eventually became its own little ecosystem.
Instead of repeatedly listing the same foundational pieces every time one of us appears in a photograph, there are now dedicated Basics pages. Lucky’s Basics, Mackenzie’s Basics, and Cori’s Basics essentially work as digital closets for the things that make each avatar that avatar.
They’re easier to maintain, easier to browse, and considerably more useful than burying the same information inside hundreds of individual posts. They also aren’t three identical pages with different names slapped across the top. Each has its own visual personality while still feeling like part of the same site.
I especially like these because they’re unapologetically Second Life. A normal blog doesn’t need a permanent reference page explaining what somebody’s virtual face is made out of.
Mine does. So mine has one. Actually, it has three.
Going on Vacation Apparently Needed Its Own Hub Too
Then there’s the Vacation Hub, because at some point I looked at normal travel posts and apparently decided those weren’t enough either.
Trips tend to become more than one post for me. There are photographs, stories, individual days, places, memories, and all the little pieces that make considerably more sense together than they do scattered chronologically through the rest of the blog. The Vacation Hub gives those trips a home.
Instead of finding one vacation post and then hunting around trying to figure out whether there were three more before or after it, the whole experience can live together. It turns a collection of posts into something closer to a travel journal, where the trip itself becomes the thing you’re exploring instead of whichever individual post happened to show up in search.
That’s another little Project Icon philosophy hiding inside a feature. If several posts belong together, the site should understand that they belong together. Also, apparently I now need to take more vacations for quality assurance purposes. It’s important to thoroughly test these things.
Social Media, But Actually My Social Media
Second Life also has its own strange social ecosystem, and the generic handful of social icons bundled with most themes doesn’t really cover it.
I’m on Flickr and Primfeed. There is SecondPix, Threads, DaHubLife, Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, Plurk, RezzMe, and everything else that has somehow become part of the world surrounding this blog. So the social navigation was rebuilt around the places where I actually am.
That sounds like a small thing until you realize how much of Second Life exists outside the usual collection of mainstream social networks. A Second Life blog shouldn’t have to pretend those platforms don’t exist just because a WordPress theme developer didn’t know what Primfeed was.
The entire social menu even has its own identity now, because apparently a normal collection of links wasn’t enough for me either. But if I’m building the rest of the site around how I actually use it, there wasn’t much sense in stopping when I got to social media.
The Little Things Became Big Things
One of the strangest parts of rebuilding the site was realizing how many tiny pieces contribute to whether a website actually feels good to use.
The navigation spacing matters. Dropdowns matter. Search matters. The way the menu opens on a phone matters. The distance between something and the edge of a tablet screen matters. How text sits over an image matters. What happens when you land on a page that doesn’t exist matters. How the header behaves when you scroll matters. How completely different page types somehow still feel like they belong to the same website matters.
Even the footer matters. Especially when the damn L in the footer decides it no longer wants to exist. That became a whole thing. At one point it came back as an entirely different L, which was technically progress in the same way receiving someone else’s luggage at the airport is technically receiving luggage.
Eventually the correct L returned home. None of these are features somebody is going to visit the site and immediately scream about. At least I hope nobody is screaming about my dropdown arrows. They’re the kinds of things you’re more likely to notice when they’re wrong than when they’re right. That’s exactly why I cared about them.
I don’t necessarily want you to notice that the navigation behaves correctly or that something has exactly enough space around it. I want you to use the site without thinking about why it feels better.
Mobile Couldn’t Be an Afterthought
That original D grade mattered for one major reason: a lot of people are reading this on a phone. I could build the most beautiful desktop website in existence, but if opening it on your phone feels like trying to read a newspaper through a keyhole, what exactly did I accomplish?
A ridiculous amount of time went into mobile and tablet behavior. Menus, headers, posts, images, special templates, spacing, overlays, navigation, credits, and sidebars all had to work without feeling like somebody simply took the desktop website and squeezed until it technically fit.
There were bugs. There were fixes. Some fixes created entirely new bugs. Some things worked perfectly until the screen moved six pixels and apparently decided it no longer believed in physics.
That included the navigation itself. Something that seems incredibly simple when you’re using it can behave very differently once desktop menus become tablet menus and tablet menus become phone menus. Dropdowns have to open properly, the page can’t disappear underneath them, scrolling still needs to work, and somehow all of that has to feel completely boring to the person using it.
Boring is a compliment here. If you’re thinking about how the mobile menu works while you’re using it, something has probably gone terribly wrong. The goal was for Project Icon to feel like Project Icon regardless of what you’re using to see it. Mobile isn’t a secondary version of the blog anymore. It’s the same blog on a different screen.
And Yes, It’s Faster
Considering this whole thing started because of performance, it would be pretty hilarious if I forgot that part. The new site is dramatically more responsive than what it replaced. That doesn’t mean every page is magically instantaneous. This is still an image-heavy website containing years of posts, embeds, music, and all the other nonsense I’ve accumulated.
The difference is that the site isn’t fighting you anymore. Pages react faster. Navigation feels faster. Scrolling feels better. Mobile feels better. Moving around the site feels considerably lighter than it did before.
There was a temptation during this project to solve every performance problem by simply removing things. That’s certainly one way to make a website fast. Remove enough of the website, and eventually there isn’t anything left to load. That wasn’t the goal.
I wanted to keep the things that make LuckySpiritor.Com what it is and make them work better. The photography still gets to be big. Music still gets to be embedded. Posts can still be absurdly long. The useful extras didn’t have to disappear simply because performance mattered.
The challenge was making the site lighter without making the blog less me. That might actually be the best way I can describe the goal of all the performance work. I don’t want you thinking about the website while you’re using the website.
I want you looking at the photograph, reading the story, finding the creator, clicking the song, discovering an old post or falling down some ridiculous rabbit hole because you clicked one thing and somehow ended up reading something I wrote eight years ago. The website itself should simply make all of that easier.
The Stuff You Don’t See
Some of my favorite Project Icon improvements are things you’ll probably never notice. That’s kind of the point.
A lot of work went into making the site easier for me to maintain too. The Credits Library is part of that, but the bigger idea was getting away from a site where every unusual thing required another workaround.
If I have a specific kind of content, I want the site to understand what it is. Sponsors shouldn’t just be regular pages pretending to be a directory. Events shouldn’t feel bolted on. Credits shouldn’t require reinventing them every time. A giant music feature shouldn’t have to behave exactly like a 500-word Second Life post.
That makes Project Icon more than the thing you’re looking at today. It gives me somewhere to go next. I can add to it. I can build on it. And yes, I can almost certainly find something else to obsess over approximately twelve minutes after publishing this post. But at least now I’m obsessing over a foundation that was actually designed for it.
By the Numbers
Project Icon also gave me an excuse to look at this place in a way I don’t normally look at it: as a giant pile of numbers. That’s where By the Numbers comes in.
After more than fourteen years, the archive has become big enough that the statistics actually tell their own little version of the story. Posts, photographs, years, categories, and everything else I’ve managed to accumulate become another way of looking at what LuckySpiritor.Com has turned into.
I normally experience the blog one post at a time. I write something, photograph something, publish it, and eventually move on to whatever comes next. You don’t necessarily notice how enormous that pile is becoming while you’re standing there adding one more thing to it.
By the Numbers lets you pull the camera way back. There’s something simultaneously cool and slightly horrifying about seeing fourteen-plus years of blogging reduced to statistics and realizing, “Oh. Apparently I’ve done this a lot.” And naturally, the numbers will keep changing. I don’t appear to be done.
Fourteen Years Deserved Better
There was another part of this that became more important the deeper I got into Project Icon. This isn’t a new blog.
There are more than fourteen years of my life sitting inside this website. There are old Second Life photographs, old relationships, old friends, people who aren’t here anymore and people who still are. There are different avatars, different homes, different styles, different versions of Second Life and very different versions of me.
There are posts I barely remember writing until I stumble across them again. That history also became something I wanted Project Icon to actually show instead of simply store, which is where Then vs. Now comes in.
Fourteen years is a ridiculous amount of time in Second Life. Avatars changed. Photography changed. Second Life changed. The blog changed. I changed. Things I was incredibly proud of then can sit next to something I’m proud of now, and the difference tells a story that neither one really tells by itself.
That’s what I like about Then vs. Now. It isn’t there so I can point at old work and laugh at it. That would be incredibly easy, but also kind of missing the point. I couldn’t make what I make now without having made all of that first. The old stuff doesn’t need to disappear because I’ve gotten better. It gets to show how I got here.
Rebuilding the site wasn’t about pretending all of that started today. It was about building a better home for everything that was already here while making room for whatever comes next.
The new Timeline takes that idea even further.
Instead of fourteen-plus years existing as thousands of separate things buried inside an archive, the Timeline gives the history of LuckySpiritor.Com an actual shape. You can move through the years and see the blog change as Second Life changed around it.
That’s something I couldn’t really appreciate while living through it. When you’re publishing the next post, you’re not thinking about where it fits into some enormous fourteen-year story. You’re thinking about Tuesday. The Timeline gets to look backward in a way I usually don’t.
There are different eras of this blog. Different visual styles, different people, different priorities, and different things happening in my life. Some changes happened slowly enough that I barely noticed them at the time. Put fourteen years next to each other, and suddenly they’re impossible to miss.
Project Icon isn’t only designed to make whatever I publish tomorrow easier to find. It finally gives yesterday somewhere worth exploring too. That’s also why I didn’t want Project Icon chasing whatever web design trend happens to be popular right now. I don’t want to look at this thing two years from now and immediately know exactly when it was built.
I also didn’t want “new” to mean unrecognizable. The black foundation stayed because it lets the photography explode off the page, and the lime green running through Project Icon gives the site its own little visual fingerprint without competing with whatever photograph happens to be sitting next to it.
The grid stayed for the same reason. Some things didn’t need to be replaced. They needed to be rebuilt better. Project Icon wasn’t about throwing fourteen years of visual identity into the garbage so I could unveil something trendy and call it progress. The goal was for someone who has been visiting LuckySpiritor.Com for years to recognize it immediately and then slowly realize almost everything underneath it has changed.
That actually led to one of the final stages of the project. Once everything worked, I started going through the site looking specifically for anything that still felt dated. Not broken. Not technically wrong. Just something that looked like it belonged to an older version of the internet.
Those things got cleaned up too. Eventually I reached the slightly surreal point where I was looking for more things to fix and wasn’t really finding them anymore. Considering how this started, that felt like an achievement. I wanted the finished site to feel like LuckySpiritor.Com.
Photography first, because that’s usually what brings you through the door. Music everywhere, because apparently I don’t know another way to live. Lots of words because I’ve been doing this for fourteen years and clearly I’m not stopping now. Second Life everywhere it actually belongs, instead of awkwardly being forced into systems designed for something else.
A little weird. Occasionally excessive. Probably more complicated than it needed to be. Very Second Life. Very me.
Project Icon
Somewhere during all of this, what started as a performance cleanup became Project Icon, and the name stuck. I’m not pretending I’ve created some revolutionary piece of internet technology here. It’s still a blog. What makes Project Icon special to me is that it finally feels like my blog all the way down.
The design isn’t something I found and adapted until it mostly worked. The features aren’t here because somebody building a WordPress theme decided bloggers probably wanted them. They’re here because this blog needed them. Every weird edge case, special post type, Second Life-specific problem, mobile adjustment, directory, calendar, credit block, and tiny piece of navigation exists because at some point I ran into something and thought, “Okay, but this could be better.” There were a lot of those. A LOT.
By the time it was finished, that meant infinite scrolling, sticky navigation, custom dropdowns, dedicated mobile navigation, a completely rebuilt post experience, specialized For The Record posts, reading progress, section navigation, the Credits Library, Sponsors directory, Avatar Basics, Events Calendar, New To Second Life Hub, Vacation Hub, By the Numbers, Then vs. Now, Timeline, redesigned indexes and directories, Surprise Me, custom search, a custom 404, a Second Life focused social menu, and probably several things I’m forgetting while writing a post specifically about all the things I built. So much for a few performance improvements.
I tested things. I broke things. I fixed them. Sometimes I fixed one thing and broke something completely unrelated on the other side of the website. I tested things. I broke things. I fixed them. Sometimes I fixed one thing and broke something completely unrelated on the other side of the website. I found pieces of the blog I hadn’t thought about in years, cleaned those up too, and reached the point where I was actively looking for anything else that still felt dated. Eventually, I started running out of things to find. That’s when I knew Project Icon was ready. That’s when I knew Project Icon was ready.
Not because this site will never change again. Let’s not be ridiculous. This is my website, and I am physically incapable of leaving things alone forever. There will be new ideas. There will be things I decide could work better. There will almost certainly be a moment six months from now where I say, “This should be easy,” immediately before losing an entire evening.
But the rebuild is finished. Project Icon is -now- live. Underneath all the code, templates, performance work, responsive design, directories, calendars, credits, menus, and an absolutely unreasonable number of “okay, one more thing” moments, the reason I did all of this is actually pretty simple.
I still believe blogs are worth reading. I still believe the words matter, and I still believe a photograph can be the beginning of a story instead of the entire story.
Second Life blogging doesn’t have to look one particular way either. It can be photography. It can be fashion. It can be credits. It can be storytelling. It can be deeply personal. It can be completely ridiculous. It can be 300 words or 15,000 of them. It can have a soundtrack. It can be all of those things on the same website.
That’s what I wanted this place to be able to hold. I’ve spent more than fourteen years putting pieces of myself into it. If you’re willing to spend some of your time here reading them, looking at them, listening to them, or simply seeing what ridiculous thing I’ve decided to do next, I wanted to give you a better place to do it.
There’s a reason “Home” felt right for this one too. Daughtry went back and rerecorded it for There and Back Again this year, taking something that had been part of them for twenty years and bringing it forward without trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. I can relate.
So here it is. Project Icon. Welcome to the new LuckySpiritor.Com. 🍀
“No, I think you’ve got me all wrong
I don’t regret this life I chose for me
But these places and these faces are getting old
So, I’m going home”
Daughtry – Home
Credits:
Head: LeLUTKA.Head.NOA.4.0 ~ Jaden Nova
Head Applier: Stray Dog HERVE EVOX TAN (V) NO BROWS ~ Gac Akina
Hair: [MFCNT] THOR Bun – Grooming Hair ~ LeBarbier Alpha
Hairbase: LeLUTKA.EvoX.Hairbase.044 (BOM) ~ Jaden Nova (Comes with the LeLUTKA NOA Head)
Eyes: [ContraptioN] Depthglass Eye ~ Walton Wainwright
Eyebase: Avi-Glam. Prism Eyes – Pack 2 ~ Eye Daddy
Ears: ^^Swallow^^ Gauged S Ears ~ Luciayes Magic
Ear Tattoo: RichB. Ears Tattoo #08 ~ Salvy Hexem
Beard: [MFCNT] Ducky Skunk Beard & Stache ~ LeBarbier Alpha
Beard Layer: PHYSIQUE X – Logan Facial Hair (v1) Tintable ~ PhysiqueX Resident
Body: [LEGACY] Athletic Edition (1.7.1) ~ MeshBody Resident
Skin: VELOUR: PICASSO HOMME Skin for Legacy (FIT/TAN) Picasso Neck ~ Kiria Mama
Torso Tattoo: Boscato Vigor Upper Body Tattoo MEDIUM ~ Boston Blaisdale
Nails: Pare.Cure Mesh Nails Both Hands [Short] – Legacy ~ Flazedo Resident
Shine: Noche. Basic Shine – Legacy ~ Danny Boo
Top: Mossu – Walter.Tank Top – Fatpack – Legacy M ~ AkiraKiyoi Resident
Shorts: SN.SHOWROOM – Maximus x Shorts ~ CelloManis Resident
Pants: [Deadwool] “Petite tuile” watch ~ Masa Plympton
Rings/Bracelets: *RE* Atreides Bracelet & Rings ~ Crashnoww Resident
Earrings: = DAE = SXD1 ~ Naomi Darkheart
~Scene~
Desk Setup: BAMSE : Kitsune – Desk RARE ~ LiamZander Resident ~ GACHA
Chair: +Half-Deer+ Gaming Chair [Black] ~ Halogen Magic
Wifi Extender: [VEX] Vexgear Wifi Extender Black ~ Vexiin Takeda
Mirror: aika – Lady Luck Mirror ~ Max Style
Bottle: SPELL : Drink me bottle ~ Iakua Aariaga ~ GACHA
Egg: *Figment* Dragon Egg with Stand-Blue ~ DreamFantasia Nightfire
Alien Plush: Dahlia & Fourth Wall – Orbit the Alien Display – Cosmic ~ William Wanderer
Pose: Black Dragon Custom ~ Lucky Icon
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