The spark
Before the domainA musician makes a suggestion
A humble musician suggested that my gaming team's own VR shooter should put its game soundtrack on a music sharing platform.
The decision
The reply"I'm making my own music sharing platform."
That was my answer. Not a platform to join, one to build.
Day one
darkdeck.net is mine
I registered the domain straight away. The timestamp is when Cloudflare created the darkdeck.net zone, the moment the registration went through.
Domain registered
Day one
The first version goes up
Eight minutes later the first code was uploaded: a clean, dark video-sharing page with upload, links and nothing else.
First code deployed
Day one
The site answers
The first version went live on the domain. Hidden from search engines, quiet, working.
Live on darkdeck.net
Day one
Public and findable
The site was opened to search engines, with a sitemap, and the public pages were sent to them straight away.
Opened to search engines
The signature feature
Every song gets a picture that moves
Songs can now be uploaded, and each one comes with a built-in auto-visualiser: it listens as the music plays, picks a scene, and changes it when the music changes.
Auto-visualiser deployed
Before DarkDeck the platform
There was already a tool called DarkDeck: a small sound-making instrument I built for my gaming team's VR shooter, for making sounds and playing around, with the idea of making it more VR ready one day. It now lives on as DeckDJ in Dark Labs, so the name could go to the platform.
DarkDeck grew from a smaller project, DarkTube, a plain place to share video. DarkTube keeps running for now. Its text, images and videos will move to DarkDeck over time.