New Website!

31 May 2022 | brandon pow | Tags: ADMIN

Welcome to the new website for the Stray Project! The team will use this website to update you viewers on what projects we might be cooking up. Stay tuned!

…what, you’re still here? Okay. What else can I tell you about…?

Objectives

The primary objective of this site is to provide readers with a website to inform themselves about the Stray Project and what we do. In addition, the site allows us to:

  • distribute intermediary updates to visual novels without alerting every player on itch.io/whatever Discord bot is fetching new updates,
  • run web ports of visual novels via itch.io embed,
  • write about more things using the blog system that may not interest the general playerbase, and
  • have an online presence not on a major social media platform (no, this function won’t be abused).

The Nerdy Stuff

As of the time of writing this post, the Stray Project website is hosted entirely on GitHub using GitHub Pages, using Jekyll and Tailwind CSS. You can take a look at the source here.

NOTE: The art assets are copyrighted, please don’t reuse those in your projects! However if you’re just interested in hosting a devblog site of your own or got stuck with the workflow, then you have my blessing to use the code. (The .yml workflow pushes your generated static site to the “github-pages” branch, so make sure you adjust the settings in Settings > Pages accordingly.)

Why not WordPress?

WordPress is a really, really popular static site generator. Lots of websites use it and it has many plugins. I like it! I’m not totally against changing to WP if the team decides the Markdown post system is too complicated for them. However I’m very particular about loading times and try to keep the website as fast as possible. I mean, it’s already an honor for people to come and visit, they shouldn’t have to sit and wait while several megabytes of assets and plugins load. (I won’t name any visual novel sites, but you know who you are!)

Then again, there are WP sites that are really fast too. It all boils down to how you choose to display images. Most images on this site are WebP format, lossy at quality setting 90 to keep the average background size under 100kB.

Thanks to…

  • GitHub Pages for hosting this website.
  • The makers of Jekyll (static site generator), Tailwind CSS (CSS framework) and Font Awesome (icons).
  • YOU for coming to visit us! Really, we’re very happy to have you here.