Colophon

What’s here

Posts

628

since 2003

Topic Tag stories

52

reader-suggested

Projects

20

stories and experiments

Characters

19

in the Commons

How it’s built

Astro, generating static HTML, hosted on Cloudflare. Markdown files in a git repository; publishing is a commit. Images and audio sit in object storage. The public archive has no CMS or live content database.

The static archive itself costs almost nothing to run. Optional interactive services add a small fixed hosting bill, but nothing here needs to earn its keep, so nothing here needs to chase you around the internet.

The whole site works with JavaScript turned off. Its small browser scripts are served from this domain and only add progressive enhancements such as the theme, audio controls, filters and this site’s privacy notice. No third-party player or social script loads with a page.

Set in

Literata, by TypeTogether — drawn for reading long things on screens, which is most of what this site asks of you. It carries an optical-size axis, so the headlines and the paragraphs are different drawings of the same face rather than one drawing scaled up.

It’s served from this domain, not from Google’s font CDN. A stylesheet request to someone else’s server on every page view hands over your address and the page you’re reading, and that would make the paragraph above this one untrue. The files are openly licensed, so hosting them here costs nothing but disk.

Anything that isn’t prose — navigation, dates, labels — is set in whatever sans and monospace your device already has. Nothing to download for the furniture.

What’s missing, on purpose

Some of this is conspicuous, so: it’s deliberate, not unfinished.

• No audience analytics. The site code has no analytics service, ad tracker, unique-visitor counter or reader profile. Like every web host, the infrastructure processes request metadata to deliver and protect the site and may retain short-lived security data and aggregate operational metrics. Those are not used to follow readers or measure engagement. The privacy page has the whole of it.
• No comments. A comment box under every post is a machine for turning a piece of writing into an argument. There is no reply surface here at all — not under a post, not on a page of its own. Email works, and reaches a person.
• No view counts, likes or shares. Nothing here should be competing with anything else here.
• No recommendations. No “related posts”, no infinite scroll, no next-thing-autoplaying. When you finish reading, you’re finished.
• No site accounts. Nothing to log into and no password to lose. An optional email list is an address and a consent record, not a reader account.
• No money. Nothing is for sale, there’s no tip jar, no membership, no patronage. I’m not building a funnel.
• No newsletter gate. When the optional email lists open, everything will still reach the feed at the same moment, and the feed doesn’t need your address.

Email subscription privacy

Ordinary browsing never calls the email service. If you later choose to use one of the optional lists — the blog, Topic Tag Tuesday or the episodes, each a separate agreement — the site asks only for an address and separate, unchecked consent for that one list; a confirmation message comes first, opening its link does not subscribe you, and unconfirmed requests expire after 48 hours. The address is processed by Resend — whose own suppliers are named rather than hidden behind the word provider — and it is the one thing on this site that genuinely leaves.

All of that, in full, now lives on the privacy page: what is retained, what is not, who else touches an address, and how to get it deleted. This section stays here because things link to it.

The permanence pledge

These URLs will not change.

Posts from 2003 still live at the addresses they were given. When this site moved house recently, every old link got a redirect rather than a shrug — including the numbered permalinks from the first design, which are older than most of the web that linked to them.

That’s the whole difference between a website and a platform: a platform reorganises when it suits the platform. If you link to something here, the link is meant to survive me getting bored, changing frameworks, or dying. If one breaks, tell me — a pledge nobody reports on is just a slogan.

Licence

Everything I own here is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Take it, remix it, build on it — see how to steal this. Machines are welcome too, on the same stated terms.

Feeds

• Blog — Posts from mcm.1889.ca — writing, publishing, open culture, and asides.
• Topic Tag Tuesday — A reader suggests a topic. I write the story.
• Soundtracks — The music written alongside the writing, subscribable in any podcast app.