We’re super stoked to announce that we are finally adding editorial content to the home page! How we’re doing it is probably different than you’re used to seeing, both in where the editorials come from and how they are presented visually.

Where do the posts come from?

Rather than have a dedicated Ampwall editorial team, we’re choosing to pull editorials from our community and highlight them on our front page. So all posts you see will be directly from a zine on Ampwall and not from the Ampwall team itself. In fact, you’ll probably never see a post from the Ampwall team on that page as I’d like to keep this zine restricted to Ampwall updates.

We’re just starting with one post right now, but we’d like to expand this soon! The first post comes from longtime community member @Voidscan, specifically his label @SHIFT+CTRL Music. One of his labels compilation albums appeared in our “new releases” channel in the Discord and it was chock-full of tags to users, so I asked him “how many people have you collaborated with that you met via Ampwall?” and we both figured it was a story worth telling, so we made this happen as a result. I don’t think our first editorial could be better! It highlights exactly what we set out to do as a platform: help communities grow (and sell some stuff too, but mostly the first part).

Going forward there’s no set of rules or criteria on what or who we highlight, so if you have any suggestions please reach out via email or on our Discord! We’d like to keep the front page as lively as possible!

What does it look like?

Our home page is a big wall of album (art), which is not something we wanted to get rid of. It looks cool and its fun to play with. So we needed a way to get editorial content immediately in front of users without interrupting this view. I tried a few prototypes, most of which involved a button that took you away from the wall and onto another page with editorial highlights. It looked okay but it made the editorial highlights pretty ‘other’ as you’d have to interact with the page to go see them, and there was no indication there was anything new from the last time you were here. So I thought “well it would be best if I could just throw them on the wall itself” and then I just did that. It was extremely simple and worked great. So now editorial content is a very large (2×3) card on the wall, and I’ve made it so that it’s guaranteed to be on your page without scrolling so that people are always seeing whats new.

This is subject to change when we have more posts, and we might still see a full home page section dedicated to editorial content. However this seemed like the perfect place to start. It also shows how we can start to highlight artwork, too!

Whats that one more thing?

Okay this came out last week and I forgot to announce it but we now have playlist embed support in blog posts. Simply take the URL of the playlist you want to embed, paste it in the blog editor and it will automatically create the embed. Check it out!