Here come new website, new design, new UI, new motor, new etcetera ! This only represent something 3 month of development while being overbusy with real-life making me having time for nothing ! ... Sadly it still continue, but at least the website is done now, and any further tweak will wait 2 months.

The first question, and actually the big question is :

Why a new website ?

For a lot of reasons ! Which all start from : the website is growing.

The number of novels

The number of novels in the website again (which was already the reason of V2 and V3) exploded the interface I planned for them to search them for. The search page was so big and cluncked every other pages; Making the website quite heavy. It's simple, each page was nearly 5 time heavier that they should have been. No point to keep this system. Also it made searching quite annoying.

The size of the authors page

The system where every novels are grouped by their author is a relic of the first version of the website, when I made it in a single day. Made to be fast to be made, simple to maintain, quick to display. All good ! But I also had only at most 10 authors when I switched to V2. The system still did perdure since Google indexed them and I didn't wanted to mess with that nor bother with a working system.
But some pages like Andur's one where becoming impraticable. I'm pretty sure a lot of visitors didn't really understood at first why when they were searching for Beyond? They landed on Until Death?... The answer was : KEEP SCROLLING !! And with the Addition of its last book... na na nah, that couldn't hold anymore (and I didn't tried on mobile, I feared it too much)

So it ends, now authors page are only recap of what is available, and each novel have its own page ! We can Breathe !!

The performances

What's impressive is how much the website grown, yet it does still work on the cheapest plan of the host I use, and I do plan to make it last ! I did my best on V3, yet I was still learning with the new tools, it ended with something fast at first, then with time became clunkier. V4 polish it a little to reduce the strain.

The size of the team

People are joining, V3 was already the goal to allow multiple people to add content to the Library, and it was fun ! What make the best of the work, this V4 will allow some little cooperation, but I'll say it : not a lot more. This just refine how epub and pdf are handled, and make it easier to have two people working on two different version of a same novel. Mostly to accomode swhp and Recchan.
Yet it's not what motivated the V4. But it's still part of it so I talk about it.

Mobile navigation

V3 was also a huge stop towards mobile users, with a mobile version. Yet I was also learning a lot on this side, which made the result quite inequal. Some parts displayed correctly, other were way too big on the screen, making big pages. I also be noticed how it was also heavy and people with a lower-end connection could struggle to load a page.
This version so is more oriented mobile experience with a lighten end version for mobile, which you can feel quickly by how streamless the new design is.

The actual work

Making our epub can be a long process, but is mainly tedious. Since quite a time I made some little tools to help me go faster on part I just feel like a robot, it did made wonder ! I can go from making some epubs from hours to less than half a hour. When it's a serie, it can a quarter of hour for only one volume. Which is great !
But now, it's integrated to the website, it means the whole will be easily able to use them too, data will also be shared between the members and the tools will be able to use those of the website. I hope everything will be even more efficient.

The name of a Team

Target is also to fade a little my name, now my avatar isn't on the top bar anymore. We have Horo that act as the logo. I try also to use at much as possible to call the website The Library and omitting my name in it. This website isn't only mine anymore. It's a team work.

And so here we are. I hope this new design will please you. They won't be too many bugs and so and so. Some new functionalities are also here like the quicksearch, and the search with alternative titles. Other disappeared like [On The Pipes], the minichat or the personal recommendations.

The [On The Pipes] wasn't maintained enough to be kept sadly. If the website still grow, maybe it will come back. Buth much later
The minichat... sorry, but it was really annoying to have two chats, please go on Discord in the top-bar, there is no registration needed, so don't hesitate.
The personal recommendations will come back in time, but it wasn't a priority.

Enjoy !