The rule

rumah panjang stores at most 280 characters of anyone's writing. The longest excerpt on the site right now is 280. The cap is checked against every item before any file is written, and the build fails if anything exceeds it.

Reading time, where shown, is measured from the full article and the article text is then discarded. It never reaches the published files.

An excerpt that has been cut ends on an ellipsis, and the lead story labels the cut.

What it costs the publishers

Nothing measurable. Every fetch is conditional, so a rebuild that finds no new posts transfers no article data at all. Images are pulled once, resized, and served from here — a reader loading the front page does not touch a publisher's server until they click.

An aggregator that keeps readers on the aggregator takes traffic from the people doing the reporting. This one is built to send it the other way.

Every headline, image and “read at” is a link off this site.

What it costs you

No cookie, no account, no tracker, no third-party request of any kind. The fonts are self-hosted. There is no analytics script, so nobody — including whoever runs this — can see what you read.

It is static HTML. It will keep working on a bad connection, an old phone, and a browser with scripts turned off, in which case you lose the filters and keep everything else.

The numbers

249 stories held, back to 5 Aug 2011. By language: 249 in English.

Of 23 sources followed, 10 return items: 6 still publishing, 4 whose feed answers but who have gone quiet. The remaining 13 are on a platform with no readable route at all.

Every number on this page is computed from the stored data at build time rather than written by hand.