# How this site works *7 Sept 2026* · Stella Ellervee A static Astro site built so that both humans and agents can read it — plus a Stargate that guards nothing. --- This site is deliberately boring underneath and slightly silly on top. ## The boring part It's [Astro](https://astro.build), building to plain static HTML, hosted on GitHub Pages. There is no backend, no database and no CMS. Everything is a file in a git repo: - My CV lives in one YAML file, validated at build time. If I typo a key, the build fails instead of quietly dropping a job off my resume. - Notes are Markdown files in a folder. Adding a note means adding a file. ## The part that's actually the point Most personal sites are written for one audience — people with a browser. This one is written for two, because increasingly the thing reading about you is a language model deciding whether to mention you. So every page here exists in three forms: 1. **HTML**, for people. 2. **Plain Markdown**, at the same URL with `.md` appended — `/cv` becomes `/cv.md`. No navigation, no styling, no token tax. 3. **Structured data**, as a JSON-LD `Person` graph in every page's ``, so a machine can extract "where does she work, what does she know, what else is she" without parsing prose. There's also an [`/llms.txt`](/llms.txt) index listing every page with a one-line description, which is a convention for exactly this. I stole the pattern from [Taivo](https://www.taivo.ai/llms.txt), who is my manager and who did it first. ## The Stargate The notes on this site sit behind a seven-chevron dialling puzzle. The hints are on the page. It is not security and it is not access control — the notes are right there in the HTML, in the sitemap, in `llms.txt`, and at their own URLs. Anything fetching this site without running JavaScript sees everything immediately and never knows there was a gate. The gate is a toy for humans who want one, and there is a link to skip it for humans who don't. Making a puzzle that blocked crawlers would have been easy and would have defeated the entire point of the site.