no-manga.com

What is this

Manga reading sites are a website subgenre I've spent a lot of time on, and frankly, most of them are slow, ugly, and bloated. I'd like to write a better one, following these guiding principles:

• Usable/simple features
• Fast/responsive UX
• Minimal aesthetic
• Prodution ready

These inform the stories:

• Discovery

  • Homepage
    • Latest updates
      • Within each page, chunked by day for the last 7 days: each page is prior 7 day stretch
    • V2 hottest chapters? Hottest series? Hotness over time? Hotness weighted by recency of said hotness?
    • V2 "staff picks"/"Community picks/polls"?
  • Search
    • For manga/mangaka/magazines by title/name, demo, genre, years
    • V2 get into that real crazy query shit
  • Exploration
    • Find manga by same mangaka, collaborators, magazine, similar demos or genres by embedding links in their pages
    • Filterable by demo and genre?

• Navigation

  • Transparent URLs
  • Get to any root route from sidebar
  • Navigate within series from sidebar (chapter to chapter)
  • Navigate within chapter from sidebar (page to page) (or maybe that should be in the page indicator)

• Reading

  • Most efficient possible use of screen real estate for page viewing experience
    • Conserve vertical space
  • Maximize reading flow
    • Optimistic pre-loading
    • Aggressive caching (still have to invalidate on page update though)
  • Easy to navigate around series/chapter
    • See navigation section

Plans

Of course, I don't have hundreds of licensed series to fill the site with and I'm not starting a real pirate site. However, my goal is build it out so that all you'd have to do to get a fully functioning site would be fill it with content and turn on the servers. I'll add dummy data to demo it.

This repo will someday contain:

• Backend system for storing and serving data and static resources
• Frontend app
• Admin tool for managing the site's content - probably a CLI

Stack

From back to front:

• Postgresql database
• AWS S3 storing static content (mostly images)
• AWS Cloudfront CDN serving static content
• Webtorrent serving static content peer to peer (I am real excited about this bit)
• Go GQL API backend with Gin and sql stdlib
• Node app backend that only serves Svelte Sapper-SSRed frontend OR Svelte Sapper-exported static site, if it would scale for number of pages
• Svelte frontend with Sapper

Logistics

It will be completed very, very, very slowly in my spare time, partly because I'm busy, partly because because all the core technologies are new to me.