Sample: how a long read sits on this page

2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Rivers make poor borders. They flood, they wander, they leave old channels behind like discarded drafts.¹ And yet we keep choosing them, because a river is the one line on the land that everyone can already see.

This is sample text, set here so you can judge the measure, the size and the rhythm of a long read. Your own essays will sit in exactly this column, with generous leading and nothing else on the page to compete with the words.

Paragraphs after the first are indented rather than spaced apart, the way a printed book does it. The first letter of the essay is set large, and the thin line at the very top of the screen fills as you read.

A page that disappears

A good reading page disappears. The type is large enough to forget about, the lines are short enough to finish in a breath, and the margins are wide enough that the eye never has to hunt for where the next line begins.

Night mode keeps the same page and simply turns down the lamp: the sun sets, and the moon comes up over the hut.

Notes in the margin

On a wide screen a note sits in the margin beside the line it belongs to.² On a phone the small number opens it in place, and a second tap closes it again.

Every map begins as an argument.

Rivers in figures

A chart, a diagram or a timeline is written as a few plain lines in the essay and drawn when the site is built, so it arrives with the page and nothing else has to load.

How two border rivers rise and fall through the year

Month	Rhine at Basel	Mahakali
Jan	700	90
Feb	680	80
Mar	780	90
Apr	980	120
May	1,250	210
Jun	1,450	650
Jul	1,380	1,650
Aug	1,220	2,100
Sep	1,010	1,300
Oct	850	450
Nov	760	180
Dec	710	110

Source: Illustrative figures for this sample, rounded

The Rhine rises with the snowmelt and falls slowly; the Mahakali waits for the monsoon and then floods. A border drawn down the middle of either one moves with it.

Why a river border is never quite settled

Treaty → Map: draws the line
Map → River: follows
River → New channel: floods and wanders
New channel → Dispute: which bank?
Dispute → Treaty: talks
Survey → Map

The Mahakali as a border

1814–1816 Anglo-Nepalese War (Borders)
1816 Treaty of Sugauli makes the river the western border (Borders)
1920–1928 Sarda Barrage built at Banbasa (Water)
1996 Mahakali Treaty on sharing the water (Water)
2019–2020 India and Nepal publish rival maps (Borders)

Where this goes

Three sections or more give an essay its own table of contents at the top, and every section heading has its own address, so a link can point straight at it.

Delete this file when your first real essay is ready.

The old courses are called oxbows when they are cut off and left as lakes.
Like this one. Notes are written at the bottom of the file, as [^name]: The note.

Sample: how to add an essay

2026-10-12T00:00:00Z

Every essay is one text file in the folder content/essays. The name of the file becomes the address of the page, so salt-roads.md is published at /essays/salt-roads.

Each file starts with a short block of settings between two lines of three dashes:

---
title: Salt roads
deck: One line that sits under the title.
topic: History
date: 2026-11-02
drawing: peaks
tags: trade, mountains
series: The salt roads
---

The topic must be one of the eight in the menu. The drawing is the small picture at the top of the essay, and can be hut, peaks, village, signpost, goat or bench. Leave it out and you get the hut. Tags and the series are optional. Add the line draft: true to keep an essay off the site until it is ready.

Writing

Below the settings, write in plain Markdown. A blank line starts a new paragraph. Two hash signs start a section heading, a > starts a quotation, and a line of three dashes on its own draws the three small fir trees as a break.

A note goes in the text as [^1] and its words go on a line of their own at the end, as [^1]: The note. Wrap a line in ::: pull and ::: to set it as a pull quote, or in ::: aside and ::: for an aside.

Delete this file when you no longer need it.