New ETJump website is live!

For a long time, our website has been bare and basic. I’ve been working on a replacement for a while now, and today it’s finally time to move on to a more modern platform and sunset the old site. Welcome to the new home for ETJump!

The big changes

Undeniably, the biggest immediate change you’ll notice is the fresh coat of paint. The looks have gotten a comprehensive overhaul, and the site now looks like something you’d expect from a website in the modern times. I still wanted to keep the site function-first, lightweight and fast, and I think I struck a pretty good balance with it.

Under the hood, the website is now built on top of the Astro framework. It is an incredibly versatile framework, although the site is only leveraging a tiny bit of its features - but it gives us options to expand into the future (which I’ll touch on later in this news post).

Mobile devices also now have first-class support. The design is fully responsive, adapting to small screens and making tiny changes to the layout and functionality to account for touch screens and less screen real estate. This was completely lacking on the old site. Anyone who visits the site on their phones should now have a much more pleasant experience.

The site is still a static site, meaning there is no backend for now, but I do have plans to introduce one - more on that later as well.

For anyone who might care, there is now also an RSS feed for the news posts.

Downloads page

A small new addition to the site is a dedicated downloads page. The old website basically just listed everything on the main page, which as you may have noticed, began stretching the layout quite a bit with more and more ETJump releases. We now have a dedicated page to list the old versions at, and the home page can stay clean with just the latest release.

The new page also contains links to download the actual game - both major source ports, and 2.60b (standalone/Steam). Additionally, there’s a direct link to download the latest development build, if you are curious about trying out new features ahead of a stable release.

Documentation

Building the website on top of Astro also gives us an opportunity to integrate a great documentation platform directly into the site. For this purpose, I have also wired up the Starlight documentation theme behind the scenes to the new site. However, porting over the documentation is quite a big job, as I also have some bigger plans regarding that in the future. For now, the documentation still lives at Read the Docs until I’ve gotten around to moving it to the new site. This will be the top priority after the launch, so look forward to that in the near future.

New content, made simpler

A big annoyance with the old site was that adding new content was… Not very straightforward. A new piece of content meant writing a new HTML page by hand, which was enough to deter me from doing a whole lot of anything. On the new site, adding new content is a breeze - anyone who knows how to write markdown can write a piece of content on the site. The pages are automatically built from a standard layout, which means all that an article needs is the content. And if you do want to get fancy, MDX is also supported.

With content being simple to write, I have plans to move ETJump release announcements to this website as news items as well. Writing them in Discord was always a bit limiting with character limits and formatting options. Going forward, expect a news post for each new ETJump release - I’ll still announce them in Discord, but the release highlights that used to be posted to Discord will live here.

If you ever feel like you’d want to write a tutorial, an article, or anything that you want to share and make discoverable with the community: the barrier of entry is now very low. All your page needs is YAML frontmatter and content written in markdown, the rest is automatically handled by the site. You can take a look at any of the tutorial pages to get an example of how to write a page.

Future plans

Having a more modern platform means we can do a lot more cool things with the site. Over the years, there have been talks about things like timerun record browsing, map database, server browser and so on - all of which would have been a pain to implement on the old site. All of this needs a backend, which is now fully supported within the framework that the website is built on, so these things can actually become a reality now. However, do not expect these to be available quite yet - they are still big pieces of work and have a lot of technical and practical obstacles to solve.

Questions, feedback?

You’ll likely see tiny things changing here and there in the coming weeks, as I work on more things. The groundwork is now done and the site is in a serviceable state, but there are likely small improvements and changes I’ll be making as things come up. I would also love to hear your thoughts on the new site, and any feedback and suggestions for the future. And if something is broken, please let us know either over at Discord, or open an issue at GitHub.

I hope you enjoy the new site - there should be some good things coming in the future!