How this website is built
The short version: by hand, on purpose. No page builder, no ready made design kit, nothing loaded from anybody else's servers, no adverts, no tracking and no cookies. The whole site is a set of ordinary files produced by one small program, served from a little computer in a spare room. This page is the receipt.
How the pages are made
Every page is written out by hand and assembled by a single program that one person wrote. There is no framework, which is the industry word for a large pre built system you assemble a site out of. There is no build machinery of the sort most modern sites need. The program uses only what comes with the language it is written in, and nothing is downloaded to make it work.
If that sounds a bit austere, that is exactly the point. It is small enough that a person could read all of it and understand it.
The face on the full version
The mask shape you see on the main version of this site is not a picture. It is a real three dimensional object, built in code, lit with a warm light on one side and a cold one on the other, and its mouth moves in time with the same waveform used elsewhere on the site.
It is drawn using a browser feature for three dimensional graphics, and the code that does it is stored on our own computer rather than fetched from somebody else's. If your browser cannot do that, or if you have told your system that you prefer reduced motion, the page quietly serves a complete still version instead. Nobody ever gets a blank screen.
What it is actually made of
- The pages: written by hand, assembled by one small program, using nothing but the standard tools that come with the language.
- The lettering: four typefaces, all stored on our own computer. No request ever goes to a font company.
- The interactive bits: plain ordinary browser scripting for the menu and the search box. No large libraries.
- The three dimensional graphics: an open source library, copied into our own storage and served from here. Never fetched from anyone else.
- The search: reads a small list built into the page itself when the page was made. It never sends what you typed anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to send it.
- The hosting: a Raspberry Pi, which is a credit card sized computer, sitting in a spare room. It reaches the internet through an outward only connection, so no doors are opened into the house.
- The tracking: none. No analytics, no cookies, no adverts, nothing belonging to a third party.
You have probably noticed that almost every site asks permission to store things about you. We do not ask, because we do not store anything about you. There is nothing here that would need your consent.
The two small exceptions are your chosen text size and your music settings on this edition. Those live in your own browser, they are never sent anywhere, and we cannot see them.
About this plain English edition
This version of the site exists because someone we love read the original and said it seemed like a second language. He was right, and he was not the only one.
A site whose entire argument is that ordinary people should be able to own their own technology should not lock people out with vocabulary and a design that demands a certain kind of confidence. So this edition carries the same guides, the same warnings, and the same honest admissions of what went wrong, written for someone who has never done any of it before.
It has its own light, quiet design, a control for making the text larger, and a small optional music player. Nothing has been simplified except the language. Where a technical detail genuinely mattered, it was kept and explained rather than dropped.
It is being written one complete page at a time. Any guide that has not been rewritten yet is clearly labelled and links to the original, so nothing on this site is a dead end.
Written with an AI assistant, and here is the honest part
The site is designed and written with an AI assistant doing the typing, working against a fixed set of rules: no invented numbers, no advertising voice, no borrowed visual effects, and a standard for readability and speed that every change has to meet.
The taste, the constraints and the final decisions are a person's. The mask, the menu, this page and this whole plain edition were built the same way the guides describe building everything else. In the open, with the failures left in.
Why go to the trouble
Because a site telling you to own your own technology ought to be built the way it preaches. Made by hand, kept on our own machine, paying rent to nobody, watching nobody, and simple enough that you could rebuild it yourself after reading the guides.
That is the whole idea.
This page in the original Kyber Cypher voice: COLOPHON