Developing the new website

For the last couple of months I have been working on the new website for mysticeragames.com. There were many reasons for this:

• The old website did not even had a CMS
• The news was only posted on X/Twitter and was integrated on the website with a widget and loaded very slow, but if you were not logged in you could not even read the news on the website
• The main location for the release notes was not on this website, but on Steam
• The videos were located on X/Twitter or on Youtube, but not on the website itself
• There was no ability to create a proper wiki without a CMS (still working on it...)

So, there were a lot of dependencies that I wanted to get rid of. At the moment of writing the picture below illustrates the way that things are setup right now to give you an idea of what's going on behind the scenes.

So right now if I want to make any changes, I start up the CMS locally, do the changes, and then just run './deploy.sh'. The deployment process might (and probably will) change in the future, but at least it's a start...

The changes

• Using only static HTML files on production and optimized (webp) images for faster browsing
• Now using a CMS: Statamic
• ... and Statamic's Static Site Generator
• Hosted on DigitalOcean's App Platform
• Nameservers/DNS handled by Cloudflare
• All Age of Jura's Release Notes are migrated from the Steam pages to their own dedicated spot on the site
• All relevant news items were migrated from X/Twitter
• Images and videos served from Amazon's S3 buckets
• Created a video-frame extractor in the CMS which uses FFMPEG to quickly create posters + card-images for uploaded videos
• News items (cards) will automatically get the featured image, or the poster in case of a video.
• And added a 'dark-mode' for the website (choose light/dark in the upper-right corner).