Rebuilding this site, part 2: the machinery under the notes

Part 1 covered why the old site had to go. This is about the parts you can’t see from the outside.

The hero. The orrery, the dust and the scramble effect are hand-rolled scripts, no animation library.

Style as a spec

The repo carries a docs/writing-guidelines.md the same way it carries a layout spec or a data contract: versioned, referenced, enforced. Banned moves have names. It has already caught me: a heading in an early draft of these notes used a word from the list and got rewritten before it shipped.

The same discipline lives in Perpetūra as a CI linter and in SkinAtlas as a canonical style doc. Taste that isn’t written down doesn’t survive a project. It has to be a file.

The glitch system

The design brief was worlds in orbit, machinery that never stops, and the site runs a small glitch layer to keep it feeling alive: an RGB-split flicker on the hero title, a scramble effect that resolves the word “Wandering,” scanlines, drifting dust on a canvas. All of it is a few hand-rolled scripts. The restraint rule: glitches fire on a slow clock measured in tens of seconds, because a glitch you notice twice a minute is a gimmick.

How these field notes get made

The notes are written from primary sources: dev logs, git history, design specs, and working sessions kept across five repos and a vault. Nothing is reconstructed from memory; the evidence was already there. Each post was checked against the guidelines file in this repo, and the novel’s spoiler policy stayed close so nothing slipped. Screenshots came from the running apps at proper device-pixel ratios; the first pass shipped blurry and that was its own lesson.

The site is the smallest project in the lab, and also the one every other project reports to. It’s the front door; the notes are the receipts.