Welcome to the New Site!

Welcome to the New Site!

Originally I was using a basic Wordpress setup for this site, and realistically that would still be the better option than creating the site myself, but here we are. I knocked this site out in a couple of weeks because I wanted to give it a fresh coat of paint, while setting up a workflow for various writing projects now that I’m finding my groove in creative work again, and I wanted to go over some fun aspects of the site that I was excited to get working. The Stack

To get the basics out of the way, this site is a NextJS application that’s deployed via Vercel. I deeply hate Vercel, but it makes NextJS deployments easy enough, provided you’re able to work around their stupid edge runtime.

I’m using the free tier because I don’t need anything more than that, but I would like to eventually self host all my websites later down the line.

Anyways, here are some fun things I integrated into the site.

The Fursona Vouch Network

I was really excited to get this set up, and a bit shoutout to Astra who discovered the fursona schema that I’m utilizing for this.

To keep things simple, the vouch network is a combination of two preexisting JSON schemas you can already add to your website: Human.JSON and the Fursona schema. Human.JSON is all about creating a mini trust network of websites that you personally can vouch for as being made and managed by a real person, while the Fursona schema is designed around hosting your fursona data directly on your web server, allowing others to fetch that data and display it on their site.

All I did was combine the two to create a simple way to create a mini shout out section on your website. I fetch my list of vouched websites from my Human.json file, then for each vouched website, I make a call to their site for their fursona schema. If that exists, I parse that data and display it in the footer (see below!).

It’s a fun little way to shout out friends without having to keep their data updated on your end. If they choose to update their fursona data, those changes will be automatically updated on your site the next time you make that fetch request!

I created a write up on how to implement something like this on your own site. You can view that here.

BlueSky Replies as Comments

I already created a system for doing this in Wordpress, so this one was pretty simple to pull together for my site. As long as it’s provided a URL to a post, it will pull that post’s replies and display that data as a comment section beneath my posts.

Right now it’s a little janky because I have to add that URL after the fact, because I have to share the post before I can have a post URL to provide for the component that creates the comment section. The workflow is basically the following: - Finish up my post and add it to my DropBox folder.

• Have the site update it’s data from DropBox
• Share a link to the post on BlueSky
• Grab the link and add it as an attribute on the post file in the DropBox folder
• Reset the cache to implement the comment section.

So, not ideal. However I didn’t want to implement a full CMS on the website, and I absolutely didn’t want to implement a database, so I decided to take the short, simple, if not a little hacky way.

I did create a basic drop in script you can use to implement these comments on your own site as well! You can view that here.

Speaking of the CMS…

Like I said earlier, I didn’t want to deal managing a full fledged CMS, but I also didn’t want to deal with the design limitation of Wordpress (I absolutely did not want to create my own Wordpress theme either). I ultimately decided on creating a folder in my Dropbox for my final web uploads. The site pulls the post data from that Dropbox folder, formats it, and caches it. I’ve got it set up to parse the directories in a way to assign categories and NSFW/SFW tags.

The actual files themselves are HTML exports from Scrivener. This allows me to add metadata attributes to the file as I see fit (for example, the post URL for the comment section). The Scrivener compile format I use is set up to give me as little friction from upload to looking nice on both SoFurry and my website, so all I have to do is export my web format to the Dropbox folder and the site will pick it up next time it updates!

But yea, that’s the site. It’s nothing super special but I’m happy with how it came out! I’m hoping that as I move forward with my creative projects I will be able to build this site out into a nice little cozy corner on the internet.

Until next time, take care y’all.

Deckard