14 years ago, I had simple ambitions to make a website for amateur writing. Then life got in the way until it didn’t, and Koal was reborn. Why I’m making Koal is intensely personal: reading is a big part of my life and a lot of what I’ve read—and some of the best bits—have been from amateur authors who are either nameless or forgotten.

Every year I notice sites that host these stories either disappearing, turning uglier, harder to access, or hiding these gems behind a paywall. It’s important to me that this trend be reversed, that there exists a free site, unencumbered with ads, where these authors can be read in peace. A place that is distraction-free, and hopefully even beautiful.

This is entirely a one-person effort, and this is a log of my work to date:

• Because I’ve turned a bit rusty with server-side programming in Rails, I decided to use the latest Rails as a backend and then plugged away at it until I got comfortable enough to use Rails as a server-side HTML framework, and StimulusJS (when needed) to sprinkle JavaScript interactivity.
• I’ve been using Product Hunt Makers as a build log, and it’s been working great. Getting high-fives and comments from other makers is great!
• After I got the basic scaffold working, I decided to write importers for the most common story sites. Right now I have SOL & Fel converters working. Next importer to be built is a Fanfiction/Fictionpress importer.
• Once I got the site live by using a bare basic design layout, I decided to spend some time improving the UI design of the site. It’s taking quite a bit of time to relearn some UI design fundamentals, get up to basic with modern CSS & Tailwind, and then get familiar with Sketch so that I can translate what I see inside my head to a page.

This is where I’ve reached as of now: having sketch design files that need to be converted to HTML.

First up, the home page:

Now, the story page:

This is much simpler, and I’d like to do more work to make the typography shine here.

I’m reasonably happy with what I have now. So immediate next steps:

• Convert this to HTML.
• Play around with the Pexel API to get great live covers.
• Get this design live!

& after that:

• Write an importer for Ficsave’s Fanfiction/Fictionpress EPUB export, and import some more great stories into Koal.
• And write an EPUB export tool to get clean EPUB versions of all these stories.