The project opened with three rules and one idea.
The rules
- Web 1.0 in spirit. Static pages, visible structure, the kind of site a person built in a text editor in 1998. No framework on the client.
- Free to run. Hosted on Cloudflare’s free tier, with nothing that costs money at zero visitors or at a modest number.
- Own every asset. No hotlinked images, no third-party fonts, no analytics script. If it is on the page, it lives in the repo.
The idea
A themed homepage is ordinary. The brief’s twist was that the theme is not fixed: each visit renders the same content in a different complete look, drawn from a small set. A visitor who reloads sees a different site. That rotation became the project’s signature and drove most of the architecture that followed.
Parked on day one
A Windows 95 desktop theme was discussed and set aside. It would have needed window management, a taskbar, and draggable icons, which is a project of its own. The six themes that were built instead are flat pages with strong personalities, which suited the Web 1.0 rule better.