Website Refresh and More

Today we'd like to come to you with a short peek behind the scenes of what we've been up to.

Radon Website

We have officially begun what we are terming our "website refresh." Split into two phases, we are improving our site's responsiveness and overall visual feel. 

Lessons have been learned in design since the site was first created in 2021. We want to continually be providing a better navigation experience for our readers. 

Phase one is already live and ready for you to explore!

In this first update, we have re-made our site's main header on non-mobile devices and also revamped all issue landing pages. You may now enjoy hover interactions with our main menu and also when selecting your stories in our issue landing pages. You can also hover over the "Issues" button to more easily navigate to your preferred issue.

Phase two will consist of re-doing our site's homepage and has been in the works for a year. It takes a great deal of communication between our marketing and editorial sections and we want to be sure to get it right. 

You—our patrons—are the first to know about and see these changes. We hope you will provide us with feedback on our phase one update and let us know your thoughts. 

Issue 7 Update

Currently, a whopping five Radon editors are ill. However, we are still making progress reading submissions and are continuing work as best we can. Issue 7 is currently in a better spot at this stage than 6 and 5 were, with seven stories currently accepted. Specifically, we have four fiction stories and three poems. 

We had spoken in previous updates about our hope to accept works more evenly through the process and so far are doing well in this. 

Fun side-story

Avra Margariti's poem "01101100 0110111 01110110 01100101" from Issue 6 proved to be a surprising challenge to display on the site. It turned out that the binary (which spells L O V E) caused all mobile devices to call it as a phone number. So anyone who navigated to the issue 6 page was booted out and sent to their phone's caller. Apple phones in particular tried to physically call the number on its own. 

The binary was also causing mayhem as Aimer built the dynamic pages for Issue 6. Our backend wanted to keep defaulting to Avra's poem for each page linking, causing the site's tree structure to buckle.

It took us a night of frantic iteration to first find out what was causing the issue, and then try to implement a fix. In the end, we had to take a screengrab of the poem's title and link that to the proper page. That's why if you squint closely, you can tell that the poem's button on our site looks slightly different from the rest.