Koal makes reading the works of amateur fiction writers easy & friendly on mobiles. Currently, good amateur writing is spread across multiple websites & newsgroups on the Internet, places that are hard to find, and sites that were built in the 90s. Some stories have even disappeared from Internet archives. Koal provides a simple, clean and modern interface to such writing.
You do not need to login to use Koal, and it's also completely free to use. Start here: koal.io.
Usable, but needs lots of polish.
Koal is built using the Ruby on Rails & Stimulus frameworks. Tailwind on PostCSS is extensively used for styling.
Koal also has an opinionated folder-structure that differs from the standard Rails 5 & Webpack folder structure that by default elevates Javascript to a top level app/javascript
folder. Because Koal uses Stimulus, which is meant to be a "modest JavaScript framework" & not a full-fledged client-side library like React or Vue, Koal places all Javascript assets in app/assets/javascripts
. The config/webpacker.yml
file therefore uses app/assets
as the webpack directory instead of app/javascript
.
There is also some importer code available at Story.load_from_folder
that makes importing common file formats easier.
To start development, do:
bundle
#download required files to ~/Downloads
bin/rails db:setup
foreman start -f Procfile.dev
Koal is currently configured to be best deployed to a Dokku instance on Digital Ocean. There is a Procfile
available to handle starting the puma
webserver.