Changelog

This page lists the changes to Square Town you can actually see or feel, one line each, newest first: new sights in the town, new rules, fixes and redesigns. Plumbing that nobody notices stays in the commit log. The things that live in town are catalogued in the field guide; the rules are on how it works.

2026-09-14#

• On a phone you now arrive in the middle of town, close enough to tell one favicon from the next, instead of on the whole wall squeezed into a mosaic of dots; the 2D and 3D buttons bring you back to that view, and pinching out still reaches the whole town.
• On a phone a square's card rises from the bottom of the screen as a sheet: scroll it for the rest of the card, swipe it down to put it away, and the square you tapped slides up into view above it instead of hiding underneath.

2026-09-12#

• A square's description unfolds when you rest the pointer on it: the card shows three lines as before, a longer blurb opens to its full length while you hover, and pressing it keeps it open. Up to twelve lines show at once; anything longer scrolls inside the card.

2026-09-10#

• A square's share page links to the site itself: the domain at the top of the page is now a link straight to the site, marked nofollow while the square was free and sponsored once it cost a dollar or more, so a crawler finds the real address there; evicted and whacked squares show the bare domain. Clicks from the wall still go through the counted redirect, and nothing in town passes link equity.

2026-09-09#

• Dusk falls when it actually falls: the sun follows the real sunrise and sunset where you are, so the sky, the street lamps and the windows no longer go dark at half past five all year round; the first windows come on around civil dusk and the whole town is lit an hour and a half after sunset, with fewer lights per tower than before.

2026-09-08#

• The town stands in a sea now: past the last row the ground drops to an earthen bank and the water runs out to the horizon, with a few pine-topped islets beyond the edge, instead of the map ending on flat sky.
• Night looks like night: the windows are already lit when you arrive after dark (they used to come on one at a time over the better part of an hour), every street has lamps that pool warm light on the ground, the lakes take a moonlit sheen and the Throne glows.
• Somebody is always about: zoom in to street level and a few passers-by are out walking at all times, more of them downtown, with a car passing through now and then, instead of the streets standing empty between events.
• The lakes get civic works: a wooden bridge wherever the water is narrow enough (people walk them), a pier off every larger lake, a lighter rim of shallows along the banks, and a lighthouse in the big lake near the centre whose beam turns after dark.
• Street furniture grew with the town: benches, bins, mailboxes and bushes on many more sidewalks, not the nine pieces the wall started with.
• A favicon that is one flat colour with nothing drawn on it no longer disappears into its own square: the roof used to take the icon's colour, so the square read as an empty slab; such an icon now sits inset as a rounded tile on a surface it shows against.

2026-09-06#

• Rewinding the town now rewinds the towers too: scrub back or run the timelapse and every square rises the way it actually grew, click by click and kiss by kiss, instead of arriving at today's height on the day it moved in; the card on a rewound square says how tall it stood then.

2026-09-05#

• Every square can leave town for a Zen garden: press the lotus on its card and the neighbours sink into the ground one by one, the town drops away, and a raked-gravel island rises under the square with its favicon dead centre, stones and moss, a maple, a stone lantern that lights after dark and a temple bell rung now and then, to slower music of its own; drag to look around, share the garden's link, and Esc or "Back to town" puts everything back.

2026-09-04#

• Deed links have a readable address: /deed/<your square's handle>/, instead of a bare token in a query string; deeds mailed before today still open at their old link and pick up the new address on the way.
• A square's share link is now a short handle like /s/k7m2xq instead of its number in the ledger, and the badge, the deed and the Visit button use the same handle; old numbered links still land on the right square.
• The category filter knows two more kinds of site: utilities (calculators, clocks, converters and other single-purpose tools) and community (teams, clubs, nonprofits and public bodies), both promoted out of the catch-all other bucket, which no longer tags along behind a real category on any square.
• The information pages are redesigned: every page is a sheet of paper on the town's grid with its own little plot of town in the masthead, body text in a serif, and a light/dark switch that follows your system until you pick.
• The town has a changelog, this page, linked from the menu and the footer.
• Hovering a tower no longer dims its windows: the highlight sits on the walls and the lit windows stay on.
• Your deed is mailed to you when you claim a square, win an eviction or take the Throne, so a lost browser tab isn't a lost deed.
• Spider-Man swings into town: he lands on one of the tallest towers, crawls up the wall, scuttles across the roof and swings off again.
• Seeded squares can be claimed by their owners for free: the card of an unclaimed square shows a "Your site? Claim it — free" panel that takes an email and hands you the deed.
• The claim window is redesigned: a receipt-style price breakdown, one big Claim button, and a warning the moment you leave the URL field if that site is already in town.
• The top bar is one row: the live pill, the search field and the icon cluster share one height, and search folds into a button when the window gets tight.

2026-09-03#

• The first visit opens on a welcome curtain instead of a controls card.
• Three new sights: a small plane crosses above the tallest tower (with running lights, so it reads at night), a hang glider runs off a roof and lands on an open cell, and two droids take a stroll through town.
• The town loads in tiers like map tiles, so a big wall draws sooner and sharpens as you zoom in.
• Towers keep their favicon colour after a slow start instead of turning a uniform pink.
• The deed is one sentence again, without the site's title and description; those live on the square's own page.

2026-09-02#

• No more sign-in: kissing, whacking, rechecking and counted clicks are anonymous again.
• 26 new ambient cards, among them a mime, a tortoise race, a streaker, an ice cream van, pigeons, a T-rex vs a crane, a wedding, sumo, Abbey Road, synchronised swimmers, a marathon, a human cannon, a sleepwalker and a UFO that drops a van.
• People and vans walk and drive across flat favicons, and joggers, clowns and the conga line climb the one-click stubs.

2026-09-01#

• Owners with an email on file get an eviction notice by mail when someone takes their square.

2026-08-30#

• Waldo hides somewhere in town.
• The live feed is redesigned: a logo pill in the top bar opens it, and it scrolls lazily.

FAQ#

How often is the changelog updated?#

Whenever something visible ships. Only changes you can see or feel in town are listed; internal plumbing stays in the commit history.

Where do I report a bug or ask for a feature?#

Message @theill on X, or use the contact page. Bugs that get fixed show up here.

Is there a feed for the changelog?#

Not yet. The blog has an RSS feed; the changelog is a page you can bookmark, and its Markdown twin is at /changelog.md.