What is ProgNovel?

You don't know ProgNovel. I'm here to explain what it is, and to explain why it's going to be a big deal for webnovel community.

ProgNovel is an open source website that anyone could get for free. Like WordPress, anyone can access its source code, make a copy, edit, and hosted it somewhere--though, at the time this blog was written, ProgNovel still in very early and in an unstable stage, thus source code still unavailable for public.

The things that makes ProgNovel different than existing website solutions like WordPress and Blogger is that it uses modern stacks and tools to help website owners creating modern web app, for novel site that they can own instead of relying on big platforms like Wattpad and Webnovel. Technically, the terms most suitable to call ProgNovel is that it is a Progressive Web App, a kind of web app that gains tremendous popularity in the recent years due to big push from tech giants such as Google and Microsoft. Progressive Web App is web apps or websites that can be progressively enhanced to work as a native app, thus can be installed on desktop and mobile phones directly from the browser (currently works best with Chromium based browsers), and can usually works without internet connection (ProgNovel has a good support for offline reading mode!).

Bleeding Edge Web Technologies

Making a website turns Progressive Web App (PWA, for short) that can be installed for offline reading is awesome, and currently I haven't seen any novel sites doing that, except for few companies (with tens or even hundreds of thousands dollars to spend) with their own mobile apps on Play Store. Although, in other community, I've seen some other websites with giant reader base developing their own version of PWA and offline reading.

Offline mode is awesome it's actually not the biggest ball in the park for ProgNovel. At least, for me, it's not the most challenging aspect (technically and creatively) during the developement of ProgNovel. What made ProgNovel loads smoothly aside from making the most out of the technologies behind PWA are technical details and stacks choices, third party cloudservices, sweeping through dozens of github repos, many of which takes a lot of time to be picked in trial-and-error fashion. Because many choices that I made turns not suited for ProgNovel (or I simply found better alternatives), there are some choices that I made during the development that I have in pursuit of better performance and more cost-optimization.

After all, to ambitiously create a great product that is free for all, there's a need deliberately create a strong foundation, to design them with great care right from the bottom.

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