SuttaCentral... Now!

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So I made https://suttacentral.now–another fast and minimal alternative frontend to SuttaCentral.net

It’s like SuttaCentral Express, except

  • Pages are rendered on the server at request time, so it always has the latest data
  • Includes all texts in all available translations
  • Automatic internationalisation based on your browsers preferred language
  • Fast and powerful “instant search” from the same API .net uses (which includes dictionaries)
  • Handles redirects for text URLs with the wrong translators name (this can be improved more though)
  • Home page loads 8.5x faster, DN 1 loads 5.8x faster, and search results 4.3x faster compared to .net[1] (but in some ways faster than .express too)
  • 1,000% improved developer experience
  • Has a real favicon

This basically shares the experience of .express with everyone—whether you use the English translations on .net or not—but with zero additional key strokes :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

  1. This uses Largest Contentful Paint as the metric, as its usually the most user perceivable indication of page load performance, and was measured via https://pagespeed.web.dev for desktop on 22/01/2026. See detailed stats here ↩︎

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This is some seriously amazing work! :slight_smile:

This is extraordinary, and it seems to work splendidly.

That there’s a root-translation side by side, the only thing missing from the main website is the on-click Pāli dictionary it seems?

There’s some work arounds to that — one is using DPD downloaded, though it doesn’t work for mobile.

Much merit for doing this work, thank you! :slight_smile:

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Thank you so much, it’s so fast. Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu

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I particularly like that one! :heart:

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Really great work! It’s quickly getting close to matching the functionality of the existing site. I notice the “editions” pages are missing, and all the various “methodology” etc pages, but those are easy enough to add.

Is there anything that the main site is doing that Astro couldn’t support?

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i doubt it! astro is the gold-standard of modern static site dev

edit: and i dont see anything on the main site that would not only require it not being a static site, but would actually not be improved by it not being a static site

i think that sentence is my first quadruple negative :trophy:

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yes pali and chinese root-word lookups are missing, as are all the references/segmentation links other than the “main” ones. i think that is all thats missing from the text pages

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Other than including all the translations, can you give a reason why someone would choose .now over .express as an end user?

Or perhaps the better question is, why would someone want express over now?

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great question! just thinking quickly, .now would break entirely if .net APIs ever went down, but .express is frozen in time forever and once built it only depends on its self. personally i like the offline archives it easily allows as well. i haven’t done either yet, but im pretty sure I can make the root word lookups on .express work the same as .net and have a negligible impact on performance without using any client js (because its all rendered before hand) but not sure how well that would fly on .now because its rendered on demand. express also has a cooler url :joy:

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it always has up-to-date data (exact same as .net) because it fetches it on every page load

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it would be “easy” to implement a yomutan like plugin to the website to allow custom dbs to be used for on clivk word lookup?

maybe even a dictionary for English so finally? :smiley:

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I think you meant: “I don’t see anything on the main site that wouldn’t be improved by static rendering.”

If so: yes, I agree. Right tool for the right job :slight_smile:

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dont take my negatives from me!

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too late! :wink:

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image
image1365×589 21.8 KB

There is a bug that the page keeps scrolling down to this view (at bottom screen) every time I open a link.

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hm ive never seen this before. which browser and OS is this? the site colours look weird. have you tried the same links that do this in another browser/device? this looks like a text/sutta page yeah? but does this happen in any links you try to other pages? are you using the “suttacentral redirect” browser extension to redirect when you open links or are these direct links to .now? can you please share the links and what exact URLs do this? what if you navigate around the site does it still happen or only if you follow a link from somewhere else? if you can you send a video of opening a link and showing the behaviour, thats usually very helpful

merry cake day btw :partying_face:

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I’m using Chrome v.109 on Windows 7 x64

I guess I’m browing with dark-mode on

Almost on every link I opened.

That being said, I wanted to mention that the site’s performance is impressive; it’s super fast, and I really appreciate the multilingual support beyond just English. It’s a very well-executed site, and I like the favicon very much.

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im glad you found it useful.

i really dont know whats going on here. i can’t reproduce on my mac in firefox, brave or safari, or on ios safari, those are not the site colours in either color scheme (is this really what it looks like on windows?!) and i dont know what in the code would be putting the /search-filter page below the footer like that, and especially causing it scroll to the bottom automatically.

how does it work in different browsers on the same machine? or even just an incognito window without any extensions running?

nonetheless, i did a redeploy of the site just for you just now (with the same code… can’t hurt) and it looks like youre using the english site, so i’d just use .express if this keeps happening, as all the english texts are on there

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okay i just realised chrome 109 is ridiculously old (it hasn’t had official support even from google since 2023, which is a long time in tech) and doesnt have HTML popover support, which this site needs for basic functionality, so that would be it, probably among other now-standard things it doesn’t support. i suggest updating your browser if possible!

note that .express will have similar issues as it also depends on HTML popover

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I also noticed that they are on Windows 7. Which, honestly I didn’t think was possible.

It kind of clashes with your HTML/CSS only ethos, but considering the target audience (monastics with ancient tech, global low resource communities) it might be a kindness to add in some kind of fall back. Perhaps you could even just do something that wasn’t a full replacement for browsers that don’t support it, just not quite so broken.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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