Lockdown. What to do with all that extra time at home? The answer: Project Phoenix.

The EVE-Radio website must be around a decade old. Its terrible, we know its terrible. But changing it would require a monumental effort and multiple people across the EVE-Radio team to make it happen. The website, while it was based on an off-the-shelf-product (Joomla), was heavily customised and linked in to our infrastructure. Its not obvious from the website just how much custom tech and automation was in place to keep everything running 24/7. Unfortunately, that made upgrading or changing it almost impossible. We would have to start again and rebuild from the ground up.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and across the world, we were locked down in our homes and suddenly had a lot more free time on our hands. So we started Project Phoenix – the rebirth of EVE-Radio, Subspace Radio and the Gaming Radio Network in general. We procured a new server (its hostname being phoenix.gamingnow.net), the gamingnow.net domain name and got to work rebuilding everything.

I’ve mainly been working on this site, and QGazQ, all of the super-technical backend stuff. The website still needs a lot more work (mainly content), but the hard part is done.