About
The Well-Tempered Notebook is written by Christian. It is a notebook rather than a magazine: things are written here to work them out, not because they are finished.
The name is Bach's. The Well-Tempered Clavier is a set of preludes and fugues in all twenty-four keys, written partly to demonstrate a tuning system and partly because writing the same idea twenty-four different ways is how you find out what the idea is. That is roughly the working method here.
Variations
A post that goes back to an earlier post and takes it somewhere new is avariation. It is labelled Variation 1, Variation 2 and so on, numbered within that original, and it carries links to the post it varies and to the variations on either side of it. The original, in turn, lists every variation written on it.
This is not a tag or a category. It is a claim that one piece of writing is a second attempt at another, and it reads in both directions.
The look of it
The furniture is borrowed from music manuscript. An article is set as asystem: its date, key and variation number sit in a gutter to the left, the way instrument labels sit beside a system, and a brace joins the stave. A brace rather than a bracket — brackets group like instruments, braces group the staves of one instrument, and keyboard music is braced. Ruled staves sit behind the masthead, a double barline closes a section, a fermata marks where an article stops, and an annotation is set as a performance direction above the stave. Where a post declares a key it is drawn as a real key signature, with the right accidentals in the right places.
None of it is allowed behind running text. The stave itself is a plain column on plain paper, at whatever contrast your screen needs. The score is the chrome.
One typeface does all of it. Where another site would reach for a display face and a handwriting font, this one uses small caps, italic, size and weight. That is the humbler choice and it is also considerably lighter.
There is no light/dark toggle. The site follows your operating system, and defaults to the dark, low-glare version when you have not expressed a preference — a toggle would need somewhere to remember your choice, and nothing here remembers anything.
What this site does not do
This site sets no cookies. It does not use local storage or session storage. It has no analytics, no tag manager, no pixel, no A/B test and no consent banner, because there is nothing to consent to.
It also makes no third-party requests. Fonts are served from this domain rather than a font CDN, so no font provider ever sees that you were here. There are no embedded videos, tweets, comment widgets or share buttons. Every byte this page loads comes from this one origin. You can confirm all of that from your browser's network tab, which is rather the point.
The site is a set of static files on Cloudflare's edge. Cloudflare terminates the connection, so it necessarily sees the request, as any host would; this site does not ask it to log anything, and asks for no analytics from it.
The reaction buttons
At the end of each post there are a few buttons. Pressing one adds 1 to a number. Here is the entire contents of a row in that database:
two-voices smile 14
A post slug, a reaction name, and a count. There is no visitor identifier, no IP address, no user agent, no session, and deliberately no timestamp — so there is nothing in that table that could be correlated with anything else, by me or by anyone who obtained it.
Nothing is written in your browser either. No cookie, no local storage, no session storage. The site does not know whether you have been here before, and cannot find out.
That has an honest consequence: because you are not identified, pressing a button twice is only prevented while the page is open. Reload and you could press it again. The counts are therefore approximate, and someone determined could inflate one. I would rather have a soft number than know who you are.
The buttons need JavaScript, and they are hidden until it has loaded their counts — so with scripting off you do not get dead buttons, you get no buttons. The page itself is a static file and does not depend on any of this.
The typeface is Cabin, under the SIL Open Font License, shipped with the site's source rather than fetched from anyone.