About this site

The stars

The box at the top of every page is a small piece of sky. The words are stones in a stream: the stars drift around them and never touch them.

Move your pointer across the box and the sky follows it: the stars near it swell and brighten, so the sky looks where you look. On a phone they drift on their own. Tap anywhere and light runs along the threads between the stars; tap again and it builds up.

Now and then a real constellation takes shape in the web, the Plough, Orion or Cassiopeia, holds for a few seconds and comes apart as the stars move on. People have always found figures in a random sky. Here they arrive by chance and leave the same way.

Castor and Pollux are the twins in Gemini. In the myth Castor is the mortal one and Pollux the immortal one; Why Castor says why we named the studio after the first. Castor's terracotta asterisk and Pollux's teal point stand for the human and the machine. The line under Castor's name carries the same two colours.

The smallest stars are teal dots. As they grow they become teal circles, and where a warm wave passes through the sky they turn into terracotta asterisks: the machine's point and the human's mark.

The stars have their own script, loaded after the page, and only move while the box is on screen.

The plane

The e next to my name is written in the sky: point at my name and a small plane writes it again, with a soft plume that lingers before the letter and plane settle together. The plane is a Mudry CAP 10, the aerobatic two-seater I have flown, simplified until it fits in a browser tab. It is a light aircraft: not the most powerful, not the most expensive, not the fanciest, but the most fun to fly, and my favourite. That is why it is in my mark.

Why the sky

The stars and the plane are an homage. Before software, the sky was the plan, and part of my life still happens up there. This site is about what I build on the ground, so the sky stays where it has always been for me: in the background, and never far.

How it is made

Plain HTML and CSS, one Python script that writes every page, and a little JavaScript for the stars, the search and the colour switch. The GitHub list is a saved copy. No tracking, no cookies, nothing to accept. How the tools and the writing get made is on Method.

The type is Jost. I'm a big fan of Futura, but in the spirit of open source I chose not to pay for it, and Jost is a free font made in Futura's spirit, by Owen Earl at indestructible type*. Castor's name is set in Literata, as on Castor's own site, and the words "we give a dam" under Chip at the foot of every page are written in Rando Sans, by Beau Maher. The pages are plain files, served by Cloudflare.

Every change gets built as a few options side by side, and I pick one after trying them on my phone. Before anything goes live, a script opens every page at phone width and refuses to publish if anything is broken.

If you want to know what I'm working on at the moment, that's the now page, an idea I took from Derek Sivers.

Reading it elsewhere

Every page starts with plain HTML, with the writing and its links already there. I like experimenting with the design, and I want the same words to be easy to read on an older browser or save in a read-later app. The stars are something I enjoy making; the page also works for someone who came here just to read.

You can fetch any page from a terminal: curl https://emanuelegrusso.com/ gives you a text edition. There are also Markdown versions and plain text, made from the same published pages. Keeping the site light is part of making it easy to take elsewhere.