can't see nav? click here to reset

project: kaylafox.au

Caution

This project references NSFW/adult content. Please click away if you don’t want to see it.

kaylafox.au

Website for Kayla Fox, a furry artist!

permalink

about

Meet Kayla Fox, a talanted artist in the furry community, known for his digital art, 3D modeling and printing, animation, and fursuit creation tools. He specializes in adult furry art, and through Patreon, Kayla Fox offers exclusive content, including early access to art, behind-the-scenes insights, and commissions.

Enter: Astra - some rabbit on the internet. We’ll get back to him (I mean, me).

Back in May of 2024, Kayla posted the above image on FurAffinity, titled “Y2Kayla” and with the description:

late 90’s/ early 2000’s aesthetics are one of my favourite things rn. (and my PSVita)

As a fellow fan of this aesthetic, this was an instant favorite for me! I’ve played around with the layout of my own website to give it elements of mid-aughts flair (e.g., Windows XP styled “windows” like my Bluesky posts embed on the homepage or the nav bar, all styled with XP.css), and I love seeing others who appreciate these kinds of designs.

Anyway, fast forward a few months, and I’m commissioning some art from Kayla. We’re chatting and when it comes time for me to send a reference sheet, I shared the link to my ref on my website. Conversation followed, and…

Kayla Fox

also is that your own website?

astra

it is yeah!

Kayla Fox

was it done from scratch?

astra

mhmm!

Kayla Fox

I'm actually looking for a web designer

We talked a bit about the ideas he had for the site, what kinds of features and style he was looking for, what websites inspired him, and so on. With his permission, I’d love to share some of the sites that inspired him because I ALSO really liked these sites:

Kayla sent me some mockup layouts he had made for what he wanted the site to look like, as well as the assets used in these layouts, and I got to work.

technology

I didn’t want to make the website using some popular JavaScript framework like React because I didn’t think that would properly capture the spirit of making an aughts-retro website, so I opted for a system similar to my own personal website’s - Jekyll.

For most of what I needed to build this site, HTML + CSS was more than enough. JavaScript is only involved for the interactive components of the page, but we’ll come back to that.

One of the benefits of using something like Jekyll is that I could define components that I would need to reuse, and abstract them away using the _includes directory. Items like the bubble icons linking to other sites/platforms are provided within _includes, then included within the page layout.

deployment

The Jekyll site and other “helper” scripts (e.g., syncing FA gallery images and post details to site files) source code is stored in a private Git repo. When new, “production”-bound changes make their way into the main branch, a pipeline for this repo builds the site. Image artifacts (art for the gallery feature) are synced to an Amazon AWS S3 bucket to keep the site build size down, and the rest of the site build is synced to another Git repo. This secondary repo is synced with a Cloudflare Pages application, where new commits on the build-repo trigger new app builds.

components and features

music player

The music player is a combination of image and text elements with a bit of JavaScript to handle button clicks (pause/play music) and printing the name of the track that’s playing. There’s also code to allow dragging it around the page.

Turbo Hotwire is used to help with navigating between pages without stopping music playback.

comments/guestbook

The comments feature is based on Ayano (virtualobserver.moe)’s Google Forms/Sheets-based comments system. The comments widget is styled to look like an old iPod Touch/iPhone Notes App.

As mentioned in the “Deployment” section above, there is a disconnect between the site build files and the image files. I tried originally to use direct image links to FurAffinity to show new art pieces, but there seemed to be an issue. Whenever the page would load, the images would NOT load unless you had recently visited the FA post in question in that same browser. If I had to guess, this is thanks to some anti-DDoS protection on FA’s side, or something along those lines. So instead, I have a script that pulls any items from Kayla’s FA gallery that aren’t already downloaded - along with the post link and title - and the post metadata is stored in the Jekyll site’s data directory (in a YAML file), while the images themselves are synced up to an S3 bucket.

site is live!

And now, in 2025, from Kayla’s Patreon:

Kaylafox.au now live!

January 26

Take a break from the corporatized, bland, ad filled and tracked websites of modern-day internet and step back into a time where creativity and fun thrived with kaylafox.au making a revival to the good old days with a fun webpage, my home! Come on over and say hi with the notes system <3

Check it out at kaylafox.au

For the full experience I recommend viewing it on desktop.

Thank you Astra Bun for making my dream become reality <3

Thank you so much to Kayla for allowing me to help make this vision into reality, for taking my commissions, and for being an awesome person to chat with. Special extra thanks to my good friend Gray for letting me bounce ideas off of him throughout the process and for his suggestion to use Turbo Hotwire.

Kayla’s Links: