How This Site Is Built

I built this site to run on one program, davar_http.exe, written in C, that reads a plain-text file for every page and renders the HTML fresh on each request. The file you're reading right now became this page is called site-technology.davar; it has no code in it, just labeled fields, a headline here, a paragraph there. There's no website framework underneath it, no build step that has to succeed before a change goes live, and no database round-trip most requests actually need. Change the text file, and the next visitor sees the change.

Almost every page on this site sends zero JavaScript to your browser. What you're reading, including the Bible reader, the interlinear Hebrew and Greek, the wiki pages, is built entirely server-side and lands in your browser as plain HTML. That's a deliberate choice: it's simpler to reason about, faster on a slow connection, and it means nothing on the page can silently phone home to somewhere I didn't put there.

I'm not going to claim a cleaner story than what's actually running. The traffic that reaches this site first passes through a small proxy program, and that proxy adds one tiny script to the page, a same-origin beacon that reports which page loaded, so I can see real traffic without paying for a third-party analytics service that tracks you across other sites. It doesn't load anything from outside dncz.org, and it doesn't run if your browser has JavaScript off, the page still works fine either way. A small number of interactive features (like fetching a single verse for the Bible study tool) use plain vanilla JavaScript too, no tracking, no third-party code. That's the complete list, not the start of one.