Under the hood
How this site is built.
In the spirit of small shops that show their working: the choices, tools and hosting behind asymmetrica.ai.
The look: Susegad UI
Everything you see is drawn with Susegad UI, my open-source component library: the colours, the type, the stamps on the postcards and the drawing of the shore on the home page. Every piece comes in three moods (quiet, warm and playful), which is what the switch in the header changes. The pieces are plain custom elements copied into this site's source, so there's no framework running in your browser.
The mood you pick is remembered in your browser only. If your device asks for reduced motion or saves data, the site calms down on its own.
The stack
- Astro builds the pages once, into plain HTML and CSS. There's no server in production.
- Cloudflare serves those files from its edge, with TLS and security headers from a committed file. A push to the repository rebuilds the site in a couple of minutes.
- No VPS, by design. An earlier version lived on a single rented server. When it went down it took the sites with it, so now there's nothing to patch and nothing to keep alive.
Type
Castoro for headings, Mukta for reading, and Kalam for the handwritten notes, all self-hosted and split by script, so a page downloads only the scripts it shows. Mukta and Kalam cover Latin and Devanagari. Castoro is Latin only, so Devanagari headings use Tiro Devanagari Marathi, and Kannada comes from Tiro Kannada and Noto Sans Kannada.
What this site doesn't do
- No Google Analytics, Hotjar or any third-party analytics.
- No advertising trackers or marketing pixels.
- No cookies, so no cookie banner.
- No dark patterns, no exit-intent pop-ups.
- No sound unless you switch it on, at the bottom of the page.
Security basics
- Browser security headers:
X-Frame-Options: DENY,X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, a strict referrer policy and HSTS. - Email: SPF and DMARC monitoring.
- security.txt at the well-known path (RFC 9116).
Sites I look up to
Kailash Nadh's personal site for putting the words first, oat.zone for craft that ignores trends, and Maggie Appleton's essays for typography that thinks. I'm nowhere near them yet, but I'm trying.