This website has been a bit of a strange one. The domain has bounced around a bit over the years, and no one really has really paid much attention to the site itself. So a few years back we made a simple page in WIX, set it on auto renew, and forgot about it.
What the WIX site looked like… Koriel did a great job on it but WIX had other plans.
TL;DR: WIX is (at least currently) a terrible company providing a continuously worsening service for a continuously increasing price. After an absurd bait and switch play I sat down, learned some “modern” frontend1, and put together this static website to replace our WIX site. Remarkably, it has been a joy to work on.
Sadly, this change up means we’ve had to replace Koriel’s excellent work on our previous WIX site. Having to replace someone’s work purely due to some other company’s garbage financial decisions is absurd. I’m sure there are tons of talented developers working for WIX working on cool things - WIX is not the cool thing. Stop it. Try to find a way out of that mess now.
Anyways, it is time to move on and rebuild this thing. Aside from a nice landing page for people looking XING up on a search engine, what is the goal for whitelotusinteractive.com?
Features
Well, for one I want to move away from being known as a one product company in preparation for “Game 2”. I’ve set up a bit of a template for our games with the idea that we can build individual pages for the games, and of course have the option of having a custom domain point to them. xingthegame.com for example now points to https://www.whitelotusinteractive.com/games/xing/, and while we can still receive mail at our old @xingthegame.com address we’ll try to move to the more generic @whitelotusinteractive.com addresses.
This blog is another nice addition of updating the website. I’ve been getting into personal blogging lately and want to continue with that.
There is a simple section for the team (just some quick blurbs and links) and of course a “Jobs” section. We do intend on opening that up sometime this year for some additional help, so we’ll make a landing pad there.
Lastly, and most importantly, the website is now well and truly “ours”, in the sense that I’ve got all the source code sitting on my machine, built with open source software and ready to deploy anywhere. Baring some foundational internet collapse, you can’t take the sky from me.
To do
- I’d actually really like to make a documentation section on this site for development purposes - may not necessarily be public, but we don’t exactly have a wealth of company secrets.
- I’d also like to have Taylor draw us up some little avatars. I think that would be neat.
- Comments? No comments? There are many schools of thought here. For now, if you have a comment, email me at john@whitelotusinteractive.com
- I actually have no idea how to host comments on this blog (it is a static site) and I’m not sure if that would even be a good idea. I found this post claiming amusingly that not having comments is akin to preaching a sermon - that was in 2006.2 There are a couple of systems that use github logins for commenting - maybe not the best solution for a consumer facing website.
- Wube Software (of Factorio fame) has a long running blog with no comments - they just push people out to either their forums (old school!) or to Reddit (presumably a subreddit of their control). I’ve mostly cut Reddit out of my life after the companies crushing blow to third party readers but I can understand that approach. Should we set up a forum?