nico://log

Today Aura went to production, the new standalone player for Blur FM, available at play.blurfm.com.

The idea is to stop thinking of the player as “that thing kind of hanging off the site” and start treating it as its own experience, closer to a music app than to a traditional page.

What got built

• A new project in its own repo
• Built on Astro
• Designed as an installable PWA
• Automatic deploy with GitHub Actions

The good part about splitting it out

Blur FM's main site stays the “institutional” website, for lack of a better word. Aura, on the other hand, starts as a 100% listening-focused experience.

I like that because it keeps the picture much clearer:

• www.blurfm.com as the site
• play.blurfm.com as the player app

Later on it will be possible to bring something lighter into the main site, but starting separately feels a lot healthier.

What it borrowed from the old project

Aura did not come out of nowhere. It borrows visual references from Blur FM's main repo:

• Colors
• Logo
• Typography
• Overall look

All that without carrying over the old structure. It was important not to mix architectures.

The deploy

The nice part was setting it up with the same overall approach I had already been using in Blur FM:

• Push to GitHub
• Automatic build
• Deploy via SSH + rsync
• Debian server configured with Apache

MVP with minimum effort

The project started as a low-fi mockup in Excalidraw and quickly made it to a real URL. It turned into a product fairly fast.

It is not fully done, not even close, but it already has the important part: its own base, a clear identity, and deploy sorted out.

Next step

Polish the player without rushing:

• More robust live metadata
• A better dynamic background
• Recently played panel
• Fine-tuning for mobile and TV

But the most important thing already happened: Aura exists.