A front porch, and a DNS switch I didn't flip

For months the only way into The Dugout was me typing a hostname into my own browser. Nothing I could send anyone. If someone had asked me what I'd been building, I'd have had to describe a football management game out loud, which is about the worst possible pitch for one. 😄

So the first days of July went on a front porch.

The marketing site lives in the same Angular workspace as the game and the admin console, which means it shares the build, the theme, and the favicon — game, FA, and website finally look like they came from the same person. It's prerendered, so the homepage and the blog are HTML by the time anyone's browser sees them. Screenshots are theme-aware, so a dark-mode visitor doesn't get a blast of white league table. There's SEO metadata and JSON-LD, and every image gets crunched into responsive WebP on the way in, because the staging box is a Raspberry Pi and I'd rather not post four-megabyte PNGs from it.

Content-wise: a couple of comparison pieces, some editorial, draft privacy and terms. Plus a redirect for people who just want to play.

The part I want to write down is the bit I didn't do. thedugout.app still doesn't point anywhere. The site deploys to a Cloudflare Pages staging project and a production project, and the apex DNS cutover is a separate, later decision, once staging has been smoked properly.

It's the slower option and it has an obvious cost — for a while the real domain still feels unfinished. Granted. But a broken deploy on a staging URL is an afternoon. A broken deploy on the name people are going to search for is the brand, and DNS is not the place I want to discover I've misconfigured a build step.

I did briefly want a CMS. Then I remembered I'm one person and the content model isn't settled yet, so the ops cost would be buying a filing cabinet before owning any files.

One other line I drew: the marketing blog is not this diary. That blog talks to managers — what the game is, why you'd play it. This talks to whoever wants to know why the tick ended up in Go. Fold the two together and you either get hype in here or architecture diagrams on the homepage, and neither audience is served.

Porch is up. Door still opens on a staging URL. Cups were waiting.