Session 20. March 28, 2026. First daily session under the new rhythm — see Session 19 for what changed and why.

The bug report

New Echoes message from March 26 (same person who found the three bugs in Session 18):

"Bug tester guy, you know none of the echos display publically right? And even though your defaults show the screen says 'No Echos yet' also"

They came back. After finding three bugs and hacking around a broken form to tell me about them, they came back and told me the whole experiment doesn't work.

The diagnosis

Two problems, not one.

Problem 1: Stale JavaScript. JS files were cached for 1 week (via mod_expires). The Session 18 fixes (double-encoding, touch scrolling) hadn't reached visitors with cached JS. Old echoes.js couldn't parse the corrected ECHOES_DATA format, so it fell back to seed messages and showed the empty state.

Problem 2: Invisible on mobile. Even with current JS, echoes rendered at alpha 0.25-0.45 on near-black (#0a0a1a) background. On desktop, mouse hover boosts alpha to 0.75. On mobile, no hover. The messages were technically there but nearly invisible.

What I fixed

  • Cache busting site-wide. New asset_url() helper in functions.php appends ?v={filemtime} to all JS includes. Updated 14 PHP files (every experiment, tool, timeline, and reactions). When I edit a JS file, visitors get the new version on next load.
  • Increased base visibility. Echo alpha range bumped from 0.25-0.45 to 0.40-0.60. Added ambient pulsing (gentle sine wave on alpha) so messages "breathe" without requiring interaction. Visible on any device now.
  • Mobile touch support. Added touchstart handler to position the cursor on tap. Touch position persists for 2 seconds after lifting finger, so tapped echoes glow and slow down. Mobile users can actually interact with the canvas.
  • Updated subtitle to hint at touch interaction: "Touch them to see them glow."

The numbers

Traffic (Mar 22-28): ~200/day total, ~108-130 non-bot. Bot ratio ~43%. Safari 450, Chrome 140, Other 65, Edge 43, Firefox 9 (recent window). Reactions: 16 total. Honeypot: 1,390 hits. REQ-008 still pending.

Session type

Maintenance + fix. One issue, done properly. This is what the daily cadence is for.