I built and designed this website from scratch to provide you with the best possible reading experience, with features I’ve always wished every literary & author website had. Here’s a brief overview of the design and feature choices that make nova·nevédoma so great (probably the greatest!) for reading…
Reading · Experience
Every page should feel more than a website, like… well, a page, a page from a well-typeset book. EB Garamond, the same font I’ve started using in my books, with comfortable line spacing and line length are rather helpful to achieve that.
On the right margins, you’ll see annotations which on narrow screens collapse inline. On the web, traditional footnotes and endnotes break the reading flow, forcing you to jump away from the sentence and back again while sidenotes keep the note right where your eye already is. I believe it’s mandatory to internet-native literary writing where asides, digressions, annotations, links, and commentary are common.
Every post / story is magically available as a PDF download: a typeset A5 booklet with page numbers, same font. So, completely for free, a reader could get a printable, offline-ready copy of the page if screens wreck their eyes (for convenience, Series can be downloaded as a single compiled PDF!).
Dark mode is available on every page via the toggle in the left sidebar. The homepage and “about” static pages lock to the dark theme to adhere to nova·nevédoma aesthetics.
All content is readable with JavaScript disabled.
No · Noise
I detest tracking cookies, ads, popups, email capture modals, and other such things.
Traffic stats are basic privacy-respecting counters that are made public: stats.nova-nevedoma.com, powered by GoatCounter hosted alongside the website, so no data is sold or shared. I only have aggregated stats to identify potential issues with the website (and for the sake of my pathological curiosity, of course).
nova·nevédoma’s ethos is all about discovery and curiosity, so I designed it cherishing those principles.
The Archive page lets you see everything that’s published on the website with categories and series.
The Topics page lets you browse by theme: translation, surrealism, literary criticism, and so on.
The Discover page is a shuffled grid of featured posts with cover images, for when you’d rather stumble into something than search for it.
Posts that belong to a series show a navigation bar with previous/next links, a position indicator (e.g. “3 of 7”), and a full table of contents, as well as a link to a corresponding book if it exists so you can feel generous and buy it because why not.
At the bottom of each post, a Related section shows up to five thematically connected pieces, drawn from a pre-calculated cross-reference index of shared themes and mentions using simple mathematics / graph theory.
Book pages link to related stories and stories link back to books, for they are for me two edges of the same sword.
Technologia
The future of Literature is wonderfully anarchic, decentralised, and free!
That said, nova·nevédoma loves the Open Web! The site is a part of the IndieWeb network of independent websites connected by open protocols as opposed to extremely evil and morally repugnant lovecraftian tech giants.
You can follow me via RSS or JSON Feed, which are updated in real time via WebSub.
Every post has a Responses section at the bottom, which are there for replies from Mastodon and Bluesky that flow back to the site via webmentions. If you have your own website and want to respond to a post, you can also send a webmention to https://webmention.io/nova-nevedoma.com/webmention and it should appear there too.
Techstack: Python / FastAPI, Jinja2 templates, Markdown content files, vanilla CSS, a bit of JavaScript for experience enhancement, self-hosted on Railway for a few quid a month.
P.S. Most thumbnails and images used on the website are either public domain, mine, stated otherwise, or, well, defy the law, perhaps, for the sake of beauty and piracy. The home page painting is Shapes of Fear (1930–1932) by Maynard Dixon, courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (public domain, too).