- Stephen Nichol
Site Revamp
Over the past few days, if you visited the site you may have noticed some changes.
I originally started Loading Screech with the name 'Retro Phase' (to highlight the phase of interest I was going through at the time) in the Spring of 2014, changing it's name soon after to the more computer orientated 'Loading Screech', in order to document my hobby activities, such as writing a text adventure in the Graphic Adventure Creator for the ZX Spectrum and building a Niche Machines FIGnition DIY 8-bit computer with Arduino compatible headers.
The colour scheme was based on the Sinclair computers with ZX80 light blue and white panels, ZX Spectrum black background, and Sinclair logo red for the main text.
My original website design had seemed increasingly drab and difficult to read to me, and I don't believe if I happened upon my own website that I would pay much attention to it as a reader with it's 'angry' red paragraph text.(Don't get me wrong - red on black is nice for a futuristic logo but, for every single article, it doesn't make for comfortable reading).
The new appearance of the home page - which will be more apparent for the full PC landscape version of the site than the portrait mobile one - is made to closely resemble one of my favourite magazines from the time, Your Sinclair. Back in the early 90's, following the commercial end of the 8-bit computer era, I still had my old computer mags, among them a couple of Crash issues, Sinclair User, and Your Sinclair.
It was the writers of those magazines whose hilarious articles cheered me up when my dysfunctional and turbulent teenage existence was getting tough. The other Spectrum magazines always seemed so factual and formal.
A dark aspect is some of the scathing reviews ALL of these magazines could give out, doubtless losing themselves advertising contracts sometimes. I can't say anything about that, and - in fact - I've yet to score anything mentioned on my nostalgic internet pages.
Likewise just about every computer magazine I've ever bought in the subsequent 24 years (as a non-subscriber, my last issue purchased was in 1992, subscriptions ended in 1993) has seemed informative rather than uproariously entertaining.
I've since noticed when delving into archives of issues I did not buy in the 1980's and 90's that there was an interesting 'swap' between Sinclair User and Your Sinclair around the very beginning of the 1990s, where SU became the stiff upper lipped publication and YS the funny one but, the time I remember the most was when Your Sinclair had me laughing out loud, and it is that look that I have aped on the main webpage.
I may have aped but, I'm no parrot - so I haven't directly copied any aspect of Your Sinclair, and I have not changed the design of every Loading Screech page. With other magazines to mimick, you never know in the future.
If you too fondly remember Your Sinclair, you could do worse than to check out the Your Sinclair Rock 'n' Roll Years, an archive of many YS articles - the address is listed in my 'Useful Retro Websites' section.
With other computer magazine preservation sites becoming broken or disappearing altogether, it really is worth taking a look - and there are associated YSRNRY videos you can watch on You Tube as well.
Thankyou for your time
Stephen