DCRC.com Development Blog and Roadmap

Early Beginnings

Deconreconstruction.com (DCRC) initially started as a personal project that I (Kohi) initially suggested to Austin quite some time ago as an all-in-one web portal for the Vast Error audience, similar to how the first page of the comic is a collection of hyperlinks.  While this design was backburnered, I used my personal website Kohi.la to host certain utilities such as my VE-specific dialogue formatter VastParser as well as a few administrative tools such as the VE News Post Editor. 

While hosting external VE tools on my personal site did work and still works today, it really gave the team a broader understanding that, while MSPFA is an excellent platform for MSPA-style comic creators, we were beginning to outgrow the confines of a website we couldn’t explicitly control.

After much persistence and pestering, DCRC formally entered development January 2019. The design of DCRC was changed between its initial pitch and initial development. Instead of DCRC simply serving as a portal redirecting users, DCRC could locally mirror the Vast Error comic in its entirety.

So I started with just that!

Here Be Technical Jargon and Planning (Initial Launch)

(A masterfully crafted sketch of the layout for DCRC's splash page drawn by Austin.)

I had an aim to deliver the following, fully functional website pages at initial site launch: the Index, Vast Error comic mirror, Bonus Content ‘comic’ mirror, Adventure Map, Vast Error Page Log, and a custom 404.

Like Kohi.la before it, DCRC is hosted on DigitalOcean and is built in the Node.js runtime environment using an Express framework. It is very versatile and allows us to do some pretty nifty stuff that we wouldn’t be able to deliver with static HTML files. It’s also very hot in the web development industry at this point in time.

As for storing and serving data, using a MongoDB structure was chosen as it is the same structure used by MSPFA and is used in MEAN/MERN stack development. At the onset, DCRC was deployed serving its data through MongoDB Atlas; however, their services at the free tier caused massive latency issues which were less than optimal so, at this point in time, all comic data is stored locally. We may look at changing this in the future as we are only dealing with insensitive data at this point in time, but will be dealing with sensitive user information later on.

DCRC Deployment and Initial Fixes

(Initial prototyping [top left], rough draft [top right], and live site [bottom center].)

The first version of DCRC had a development lifespan of about two months. In the beginning, it had a due date of "it's done when it's done" but in an effort to make the yearly 3/22 celebrations truly special, the aim was to have an operational website ready to launch at the same time as Snowbound Blood. There were a few bugs at launch (the aforementioned MongoDB Atlas latency problems as well as general cleanup between back-end and front-end rendering) but those have been quashed, making DCRC the best place to read Vast Error!

What is Planned for the Future of DCRC?

We've compiled a massive list of planned features and improvements on the site's private GitHub repository that the team is gradually working through. This list can be boiled down to:

• Mobile Responsiveness - Optimize existing mobile page styling and apply styling to current pages that do not include them. (e.g. the main splash page and the navbar)
  
• Improvements to Bonus Content - Clarifying what is considered ‘bonus content’ and what is considered unique page locations. (e.g. ArcKat April Fools is bonus content whereas the Credits list could be broken into its own page at /vasterror/credits)
  
• Accessibility and Language Support - Giving users the ability to toggle comic options to suit their needs. We are looking to start this by allowing users to toggle on/off quirked chatlogs and/or disable CSS. In the future, we will look into expanding this feature to include Vast Error language translations.
  
• DCRC Search Engine - Allow users to search a selected comic (only Vast Error and its Unquirked variant at this point) for keywords. In the future we may look at expanding this to be similar in scope to the Homestuck Asset Locator.
  
• Dedicated Admin Panel and CMS - Allow VE Administrators to easily modify site content (e.g. news posts) with a robust content management system. With this update, all story files will be hosted on DCRC instead of Pipe or Imgur.
  
• RSS and API Development - For application developers in the fanbase, we will be refining the existing API for DCRC to allow external applications to plug into the site. We will also be writing RSS Feed generation for both the comic and the news so users can subscribe to these updates.

Far-Off Future Updates

We also have a few other planned updates that are either very large in scope or is waiting for additional dependencies. These updates include:

• The Mirrorer Becomes the Mirrored - All of Vast Error is hosted and maintained on DCRC and mirrored to MSPFA. (at this point, DCRC is essentially a locally-stored mirror of MSPFA) Progress on this will begin as we develop the CMS but cannot come to fruition until MSPFA’s rewrite begins development and delivers a MSPFA API we can use to modify pages.
  
• Etchelize Yourself a Readable Quirk, Dingus - Some small and fun public utilities will make their way to DCRC! The VastParser utility will migrate to DCRC and be rewritten/revised; for VE Admins, we will look into integrating it directly into the story page editor. I also have a personal desire to make an interactive Etchelizer Symbol Generator.
  
• Select Your Fighter - An interactive page of Vast Error characters. Will will look into tying this feature to our Vast Error Wiki.

If you aren't already, you can follow @VastError for larger DCRC announcements or my personal @Kohilaice for a more intimate glance into DCRC development progress.

-Kohi and the DCRC Dev Team