What Makes zSnout Different?

An overview of zSnout 5's theme system and offline capabilities.

To me, many things stand out about zSnout that I simply don’t see in other websites. For example, zSnout has many subsites for different purposes whereas most websites have one main purpose, it uses a different theming system that other websites, and it was designed from the ground up to work as an app. I think that’s pretty cool, and I want to explore it more!

This article was written about zSnout 5, a previous version of the site. Some of these changes may no longer apply.

zSnout Serves Multiple Purposes

One of the things I’ve seen with almost every other website (and most pieces of software) is that they have a singular purpose. For example, Google Docs is dedicated to providing a good writing experience, Khan Academy aims to teach people different things, and YouTube is good at connecting people with videos they’ll enjoy. On the other hand, zSnout has lots of different content, as you can tell from spending over three seconds on the homepage. One reason for this is that it’s mostly a hobby of mine because I like coding and I thought it would be fun to have a website where I could present my code to other people.

A Different Theming System

Another reason I notice that zSnout’s different is in our theming system. Most sites I’ve seen either use a white theme with an accent color or have a separate theme for when the user’s in dark mode. On zSnout, we default you to using the dark theme and allow you to choose which theme you want. Additionally, our “dark” theme is mostly aqua because it’s my favorite color and I like to feature it prominently in things I make, whereas most websites use a strictly black theme for “dark mode”.

It’s an App?

To tell you the truth, I’m surprised at how few websites make themselves offline-capable. With modern web technologies it’s super easy to store pages for later use. For example, try disabling your internet connection and reloading this page. It’ll still work because it’s stored locally on your device. In fact, any page you’ve visited recently will be stored on your device. You can also install zSnout locally to your device as an application.

All Code is Open Source

Another thing that makes zSnout different is that ALL of the code used in the website is publicly available for download as https://github.com/zsnout/zsnout.com. Because of this, it allows anybody to submit an issue, bug report, or feature request. Other people can even contribute code to zSnout, so long as they pass our security checks and manual reviews.

In conclusion, I think that zSnout is a very different website than most, but it’s still a great site and has been a fun project for me to work on. I hope to create something amazing that people will enjoy, and I hope to see more people use zSnout in the future. Thanks!