Devlog 1

Alright, first one of these so let’s keep it honest instead of doing a highlight reel. ARCHIVE-7 is a materials reference site I’m building that’s skinned like a terminal from a sunken Art Deco engineering archive. Steel, concrete, timber, that kind of thing but presented like you salvaged the data from underwater instead of scrolling a normal database. That’s the pitch anyway. Where it actually is right now is a bit messier than the pitch.

The nav is a pressure gauge and I’m still into that idea. Instead of a normal navbar there’s a vertical gauge running down the left edge! A tube with five stops on it, marked in fathoms instead of section names (0, 22, 48, 76, 110). Click a stop, in theory the fill level rises to meet it and the whole thing feels like you’re descending deeper into the archive. In practice, right now, the animation just isn’t firing. It snaps to the new state instead of settling into it so at the moment it’s basically a fancy-looking list that skips the part that made it interesting. That’s next on the list to actually fix not just assume is working because the CSS looks right.

The landing page has a hole in it. This one stings a bit to post but whatever, that’s the point of a devlog. The cover page is supposed to show a facility summary and a featured specimen pulled from the real data. Something that gives you a reason to be on that page instead of just a title. Right now both of those sections are rendering completely empty. The header text up top is fine, the sign-off line at the bottom is fine but there’s a big gap in the middle where actual content should be.

Small thing but noting it. There’s a thin vertical line + rotated readout sitting on the right edge, purely there to balance the gauge visually so the page doesn’t feel like it’s all weighted to one side. Right now it’s sitting a little too close to the scrollbar for my taste. Minor but going on the list.

So that’s the state of it. Visually the parts that ARE rendering look like what I want. The palette, the type, the gauge shape but structurally there’s real stuff not working yet. Next devlog is hopefully “the gauge moves and the cover page isn’t empty” we’ll see!