On carving a website out of stone

This is a sample essay. The words are filler; the shape is real.

Every link on the home page is a slab of basalt. Press it and it sinks. Let go and it slides out of its recess and takes you somewhere. The first version was a rounded rectangle with a noise filter on it, and it looked exactly like what it was: a button wearing a costume.

What changed

Three things. The edges got chipped, the slab got a side you could see, and the shadow stopped being a soft widget glow and became something a lamp would cast.

The texture was never the problem. The silhouette was.

The second version used real stone, generated once and tiled. Four tiles, under 250 KB, and the page still loads in under a second on a phone.

What the library is for

The home page is the entrance. This room is where the writing lives. Essays like this one, poems, and notes that don't deserve a title. Each one is a page, so a search engine can read it, and so can you.

• Essays run long and have headings.
• Poems keep their line breaks.
• Notes are short and undated in spirit.

That's the whole system. Drop a file in, run the build, and it shelves itself.