How it's built#
This site is a hand-built static site. Every page is plain HTML, generated ahead of time by a small build script written in vanilla JavaScript using only Node's standard library — no frameworks, no third-party dependencies, nothing to keep up to date or patch.
The result is a site that is fast, durable, and almost embarrassingly cheap to host: a folder of files that any static host can serve, that will still work in a decade, and that loads in well under a second on a slow connection.
Principles#
There's a small philosophy behind the technical choices, in keeping with the subject matter:
- Text first. The content is the point. Everything else gets out of its way.
- No surveillance. No trackers, no analytics that follow you, no third-party scripts. The site doesn't need to know who you are to show you an idea.
- Works without JavaScript. Every page is fully readable with scripts disabled. JavaScript only enhances — theme switching, search, the filter on the idea index.
- Fast and light. A single small stylesheet, system fonts, inline SVG icons, and images generated at build time. No web-font flash, no layout jank.
- Accessible. Semantic HTML, real landmarks, keyboard-navigable, good colour contrast in both themes, and a skip link.
- Durable URLs. Clean, stable paths that are meant to keep working.
Details#
- Typography — system serif for reading, system sans for interface. No external fonts.
- Theme — dark by default, with a light "paper" theme; your choice is remembered locally.
- Social & app images — the Open Graph image and the favicons are generated at build time by a tiny PNG encoder built on Node's
zlib. The wordmark is rendered in a 5×7 pixel font, a small nod to the era this site celebrates. - Feeds & metadata — every page carries Open Graph and Twitter card tags and JSON-LD structured data; the site ships a sitemap, an RSS feed, and a web manifest.
Credits#
Built with care, and with enormous debt to the people whose ideas fill these pages. The writing is shared under CC BY 4.0.