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New Site

Jesse

• 3 min read

Welcome to the new and improved Jellie Frontier. The entire site has been overhauled with a new design, layout, and even back-end engine.

Origins

As you may know, the original website was written from scratch, by me, in Visual Studio Code. It was a great opportunity to learn more advanced HTML, CSS, and javaScript. However, this old-school method of web design came with many limitations that I outgrew as I wanted to do more with the base website.

Choosing a new back-end

I've been wanting to overhaul this site for a long time, so I've been looking for a new tool that would fit my needs. I knew I wanted something that could do the following:

  1. Blogging - Like many who enter the self-hosting world, I want to document and share my experiences with others to help them learn new things and avoid the pitfalls I ran into. The new platform needed proper blog support (posts, RSS, newsletters, comments, etc).
  2. Ease of Use - Now that I have the experience of creating websites from scratch, I'd like to spend more time on other content. This means that maintaining and updating my site should be relatively easy.
  3. Self-Hostable - This seems like a no-brainer given the entire purpose of the site, but it's amazing how many website platforms out there have no self-hosted option.
  4. Open Source - In keeping with my values, I also want to use and support FOSS. This also helps protect me from platform 'rug pulls'.
  5. Aesthetically pleasing - While I can make a site usable, I'm not exactly a master of graphic design, so I wanted something with beautiful templates that I can customize.

After about a year of passively searching, I've found a platform that fits all of these needs and more: Ghost

Redesign

This shift has enabled a reorganization of the site resources. I've moved things around, trimmed out unused stuff, and improved overall usability. Here's a list of the more notable changes:

  • The Home page is now a blog. This will show the latest news and information about the entire Jellie Frontier ecosystem. The original home page didn't serve much purpose, so a blog feed made way more sense.
  • The Social page is cleaned up.
    • The forums have been taken offline. While I am super nostalgic for the phBB forum days, these were basically unused, and php is a bit of a security vulnerability unless I stay on top of the patches.
    • I've removed the link to the private Discord. There wasn't really any reason to have it there since it's invite only and everyone I want to be there is already there.
    • I've given up on hosting a Matrix Server (for now). I couldn't find the right tools for the kind of setup I want, and getting people to switch from Discord seems an insurmountable task at the moment.
    • This just leaves Mastodon as the only public social network I use regularly.
  • Plex resources are no longer embedded. These were hard to use in an iframe anyway, so I've just added buttons to the respective platforms.
  • The Games page is completely reorganized. It's split into 3 main categories:
    • Container repositories - I've recently begun working on my own custom game server containers for others to use in their self -hosted setups. As they become available, I'll be linking to them here.
    • Doom - This was a fun project that was originally an easter egg. It still works well, so I've given it it's own web page and linked to it here.
    • Jellie Frontier Servers - These are invite-only servers for my friends/family, so the details will be locked behind a login. Here they are secure, yet still easy to find for members.
  • The Status page is mostly the same. I've updated the theming to match the new site. I'll be tweaking the services it displays in the near future.
  • The About page has been expanded a little bit, giving more context as to what this website is.

That basically sums up the site redesign. I hope you like it!