We are delighted to inaugurate with you Digital Overdose's new website !

Starting last Saturday, we have worked hard to build this website for the Digital Overdose community. Our aim was to have a friendly front-facing window into our community, with a certain degree of importance laid on what we do, who we are, and how we do things.

Another aspect of this site is the posts section. We aren't reserving it for the Digital Overdose team, but for anyone that would like to publish a post or an article and doesn't have the necessary infrastructure to do so by themselves.

Wow that's fast!

You are right, and what helped a lot was having people involved that have a certain comprehension of Angular, and also having access to the software architecture for a website produced the same way by AtomicMaya, who was very involved in the creation of this website. (you can check it out here).

How did we make it?

You might be thinking something along the lines of "Wow, this website loads so fast!", and rightly so. But the only way to do this would be by having a purely static site, no?

Not exactly.

This site was built using the Angular framework, which usually produces fully dynamic websites. But fully dynamic websites sometimes cause problems when it comes to Search Engine Optimization as well as metadata display (the vignettes that appear when you post a link to a website on Twitter for example). This happens because what you see is generated only when the website is loaded in your browser.

Other development methods involve having the server render the content and then send it to the browser. That is fantastic, except we actually don't own any server hosting. In the interest of saving costs, we are hosting this website on GitHub Pages, which offers a fantastic solution to host static sites (for free!).

So how did we get around that hurdle? We used a technique called prerendering. What it does is it emulates a server and tries to scan all of it's pages. It then makes a copy of those pages and that is what we upload to GitHub.

As for the visuals, we used the Bootstrap framework and the FontAwesome icon library to make everything look nice and responsive.