This site — a garden, on purpose

How and why haavarsen.com is built the way it is, and what it deliberately leaves out.

You’re reading it right now. haavarsen.com is a small Astro site, bilingual (English and Norwegian), hosted on Cloudflare Pages, deployed straight from its own repo on every push. It’s the one thing here that isn’t an app — it’s the place the other things get talked about.

What it deliberately isn’t

No photo, no bio, no résumé, no analytics, no trackers, no third-party scripts of any kind. That’s not an aesthetic choice so much as the same instinct behind Skravle and Cordwipr pointed at my own site instead of someone else’s app: collect nothing you don’t need, and say plainly what you are collecting (nothing).

How it’s organized

Notes, not posts. Each one carries a topic list and a sense of how settled it is — seedling (rough, thinking out loud), budding (taking shape), or evergreen (this one, mostly done changing). Notes can link each other directly in the text with [[wikilinks]], and every note quietly lists what links to it at the bottom — the small mechanism that turns a pile of pages into something that actually connects.

A note doesn’t need a translation to exist. Plenty here are English-only or Norwegian-only; the language switcher just falls back sensibly when there isn’t one.

What it’s made of

Astro, hand-written CSS, a handful of small pure-SVG animations (no JavaScript framework, no client-side bundle to speak of), and a background painting — Hans Dahl’s Siste stråler — that’s stayed put through several redesigns because it’s the one thing that made this feel like my site rather than a template. I tried a completely different, whiter, more “blog” version of this for a while. It didn’t feel like mine, so it’s gone, and this is what’s left once you take that back out.