I have a new website

Okay, it’s the same domain as my old website and mostly the same content, but! There are some new things!

The TL;DR

• There’s now finally a gallery section with a few dozen images (including NSFW ones, so don’t click “Show NSFW” unless you mean it).
• Newer stories including “Summons,” “Disruption,” and “Return to Office” are included.
• Serials are on their own page now, including three new-to-the-site ones: Big Trouble, Goddess, and the “Saida Gets Eaten” vignettes.
• And, yes: Goddess is available online for the very first time anywhere!
• The article section has been expanded, bringing together stuff that was previously in a mishmash of “essays” and blog posts (across two blogs!). This is basically now just Arilin’s Blog (tm).
• Story tagging and indexing is a lot better.
• And, while the domain remains giants-club.net, the name of the website is just “Arilin Thorferra” now.

The nerdy stuff

Years ago, I chose a static site generator called Lektor for my site. The new site uses a system called Zola. They’re both relatively unusual in that they don’t assume your static site is basically a blog; a lot of the “big names” in this space will really fight you if what you’re trying to do isn’t very blog-like.

Lektor is, in some ways, still better for what I want to do than Zola is. But Lektor is slow. Maybe my design makes it work too hard generating tables of contents or previous/next navigation, but I’ve grown loath to add more serials to it. It’s also kind of wonky: it expects you to add new pages through a locally run web interface. That’s nice for people who aren’t comfortable with a web editor, but the interface for adding those pages gets exponentially slower the bigger the site gets. Worse, Lektor’s installation is fragile. Nearly every time I wanted to update the site, I’d discover a routine system upgrade had somehow broken the Python “virtual environment” Lektor was installed in, and I would spend an hour or two debugging it. (That it took Lektor’s developers literal years to correct outdated installation documentation didn’t help.)

Zola, by comparison, is one self-contained binary written in Rust. I don’t need to put any real effort into maintaining it. And the new site—which has over two dozen more HTML pages, including the gallery page—builds literally thirty times faster. It’s almost instantaneous.

So are you going to update faster?

Well…yes, with an asterisk.

Here’s the thing: I’m still not completely sure how to handle in-progress serials on the site. As it’s written now, you can’t easily tell when a serial is being updated, well, serially. I’m going to look into ways to address that, but it’s complicated. The site may end up just being for finished works: once a serial is finished being serialized, it’ll show up here as a whole piece.

If you really want to see all my work the fastest, posted closest to as-written, though, there’s an easy way: subscribe to my Patreon! I have one novel, Saida & Autumn, that’s only available through Patreon or buying it from FurPlanet or Bad Dog Books; while my subsequent work has all shown up on FA, it’s always on a delay. And some future work might remain Patreon-exclusive for longer.