Colophon

How this site is built.

The premise

One sentence that anyone can pay to change, one word at a time. Every change is permanent and public. The technical work is mostly in honouring two promises: the sentence never goes down or blanks out, and history can never be quietly rewritten.

Architecture

• One server process answers everything: the page you are reading, the public API behind the board, and the live feed that pushes every committed edit to everyone viewing.
• The sentence's history lives in append-only storage. A completed edit is written once and never rewritten; later edits supersede it. The permanence promise rests on that being boring and inspectable.
• The words are placed into the page before any script runs, so link previews, crawlers, and slow connections all see the real sentence first. The interactive board then takes over.
• The mobile edit experience behaves like a native sheet rather than a web popup: hold a word to open it mid-press, drag or tap outside to dismiss.
• Payments are handled by a third-party merchant of record under its own terms; card details never reach this site's systems.

Type

Fraunces carries the sentence itself (a wonky old-style serif, because the product is a text toy), Figtree does the interface, and IBM Plex Mono marks prices, versions, and anything numeric.

Design discipline

Every colour pairing on the site is checked against WCAG contrast requirements by an automated audit before it ships. Motion honours your system's reduced-motion setting. Touch targets are at least 44px, and screen readers hear the sentence as prose rather than a hundred buttons.

This site declines to use

• No analytics. Nobody's visit is counted, plotted, or sold.
• No tracking cookies and no accounts. The browser stores three small things: a first-visit flag, your own placed words, and an in-flight payment reference. Each is described in the privacy policy.

Questions go to [email protected].