Colophon
This site runs on a computer in the house. No hosting company, no control panel — just a box, a container, and a tunnel out to the internet.
How it gets to you
The server never opens a port. Instead it dials out to Cloudflare and holds that connection open; when you load this page, the request travels back down that tunnel. Cloudflare handles the certificate and absorbs anything unpleasant before it reaches us.
The pages themselves are static HTML built by Astro and served by Caddy. Editing means committing to a Git repository — by hand, or from two small editing pages that do it for whoever is signed in to GitHub; the server pulls, rebuilds, and swaps the files in. Nothing here is running a database.
The stack
| Piece | What it does |
|---|---|
| Astro | Turns these files into plain HTML at build time. Ships zero JavaScript unless a page asks for it. |
| Caddy | Serves the built files. Roughly ten lines of config. |
| cloudflared | Holds the outbound tunnel open so nothing has to be port-forwarded. |
| GitHub Actions | Checks formatting, types, the build and every internal link on each push. |
Why it looks like a chart
Swathwise is for people who fly, and every Part 107 pilot learned to read a VFR sectional. So the colours are a sectional’s: terrain green, magenta and blue airspace ink, the yellow of a city. The front page flies a route of its own, solid scan lines and dashed turns as in the app, from the green home point to the ring at the end.
The type
| Typeface | Used for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Big Shoulders | The large headings | A condensed American gothic, for the feel of a road sign. |
| Overpass | Everything to read | An open take on Highway Gothic, the lettering on US road signs. |
| B612 Mono | Data | Drawn for Airbus cockpit displays, to be read at a glance. |
All three are open-source, under the SIL Open Font License, and are served from this site, not from a font service.
What is counted
There are no cookies and no advertising on the pages you read, and the site itself ships no JavaScript. Visits are counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics: Cloudflare adds one script to each page on its way to you, and it is the only thing these pages load from anyone else. The privacy notice says exactly what it sends.
The screens on the front page are real ones from the app, and the numbers beside them are written by its planner.