Colophon

Drift is built and maintained by one person, Thomas, in the Netherlands. There is no company or team behind it. It started as a way to find out whether a feed could work differently, which needed building one and using it for a while.

Practically, that means replies come from me and can take a few days, and things break occasionally. The ones worth writing up end up in notes.

• A web app rather than a native one. Next.js and React, installable to a home screen. One codebase, no app store.
• Local first. A session lives in the browser's own database; the cloud is a sync layer on top, so the app keeps working when it is unreachable.
• Postgres with row level security. The rule that you can only read your own rows is enforced by the database rather than by the application code above it.
• Trail maps in plain SVG, drawn in React and exported to an image in the browser.

Everything goes through Drift's own server. The browser never calls Wikipedia directly. Partly etiquette, since a browser cannot send the identifying header Wikimedia asks API clients for, and partly so there is one place to filter out pages that make poor cards: disambiguation stubs, list pages, anything with no real text.

The palette is checked rather than assumed. Drift targets WCAG 2.2 AA contrast, verified two ways: a test that reads the colour values, and a sweep that opens every page in both themes and measures rendered pixels. The second exists because the first cannot see what happens when a translucent tint lands on a dark surface. There is a note on the audit that prompted it.

Warm off-white rather than white, ink-dark text, one muted accent used sparingly, and a dark mode of warm grey rather than black. Titles in a serif, body text in a sans, both at a generous line height.

The pictures on the public pages are hosted here rather than linked from their source, so they are credited individually.

• Art and antiquities. The Art Institute of Chicago, under CC0 1.0. No credit is required; the museum requests one and this is it.
• Sea creatures. Plates by Ernst Haeckel, who died in 1919, so they are public domain in Europe and everywhere else.
• Earthrise. William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968. NASA.
• Saturn and Jupiter. NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute, from the Cassini mission.
• The Pillars of Creation and the Whirlpool Galaxy. NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA), under CC BY 4.0.

To the Wikipedia editors who wrote the content, to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago for putting their collections in the public domain with usable APIs, to NASA for putting a telescope's worth of pictures in the public domain, and to the people in the beta who reported what was broken.