Drafted

14 posts

StandaloneOct 3 · 2 min

What this place is for, what you will find in it, and how to read it without an account, a cookie or a tracker.

I started writing on Medium and was not consistent. The limits I kept running into were the platform's, so I built a place of my own.

Why Drafted is built once and served as plain pages, and why the build only runs when I ask it to.

Series pages show how many parts you have read and where to go next, so a multi-part series is easy to come back to.

Save a post, close the tab, come back on another device. How bookmarks and reading progress work, signed in or not.

Drafted follows your system theme, remembers your choice, and is checked for contrast and keyboard use before every deploy.

Before the first real post, I sealed the site: a strict browser policy, default-deny data, and three things that broke on the live site.

Accounts on Drafted use an email and a password, nothing else. And the author is whoever owns one verified mailbox.

I started by wanting an AI to moderate comments. I ended up with comments nobody else can see, and nothing left to moderate.

No email list, no likes. Just feeds, done properly: full text for every post, series and topic, in three formats.

A blog needs a database for almost nothing. Here is the one small document per reader, and how it avoids losing anything.

Press / anywhere and search every post and series. There is no search server and no search history.

The brief I started with: a calm place to read, one strong idea about images, and a promise to write down every decision.

I wanted type and layout to do the work a picture usually does. That one rule shaped the whole site.