The lights are back on, the whiteboard is full, and the first new build is already making a mess.

We are starting small this season, but small does not mean lazy. Here is the short list of what landed in the very first internal build:

• Cleaner menus that stop fighting your mouse.
• Faster loading on the blog and the project pages.
• A friendlier home page that actually tells you what Mad Splash is.

Why bother restarting at all?

Because the old site still had fans poking at it, and it felt rude to leave the door locked. We dusted off the repo, ran the build, and were pleasantly surprised that only most of it was on fire.

Here is the tiny script that now greets every fresh checkout:

CODE #!/bin/sh
# splash-hello: sanity check before you waste an afternoon
php -v || echo "no php, no party"
test -f database.sqlite && echo "db present" || echo "run the seeder!"

If you want to follow along with every messy step, the dev blog lives at https://madsplash.net/blog, and the roadmap notes are pinned over on the community boards.

Here is the very first screenshot of the reopened lab, mess and all:

More soon. Bring snacks.