A colophon is a note about how something is made. This one covers the tools and services behind Socionics Insight.
Site generator
Eleventy (11ty) v2 — a static site generator. Every page on this site is pre-built HTML. There is no server-side rendering, no database query on page load, and no compute cost per visitor. Pages are fast by default.
Templates are written in Nunjucks. Content is written in Markdown. There is a single CSS file and minimal JavaScript — only where interactivity genuinely requires it.
Hosting and deployment
Netlify — legacy free plan. The site deploys automatically from GitHub on every push. Netlify serves the pre-built static files; there is no backend to maintain.
Cloudflare handles DNS and CDN caching in front of Netlify.
Source code
The site repository lives at github.com/sstern42/socionics-insight (private). The underlying data — types, functions, relations, groups — is published separately as an open source npm package. See the Open Source page.
Analytics
Umami — open source, privacy-respecting, no cookies, no cross-site tracking. Custom events track quiz completions and book link clicks. The analytics instance excludes the site owner's own visits via a localStorage flag.
MailerLite handles the email list. Subscribers receive an intertype relations reference PDF on signup. There are three capture points: an inline block in longer articles, a sticky footer bar with a dismiss option, and a widget in the site sidebar.
Search
Pagefind — a static search library that indexes the site at build time and runs entirely in the browser. No external search service, no API calls. Full-text search across all pages.
Socion app
The Socion matching app is a separate product built on a different stack:
- Frontend: React, hosted on Netlify
- Backend / database: Supabase — managed Postgres with built-in auth and real-time
- Repository: github.com/sstern42/socionics-match
Socionics data
The type, function, relation, and group data that powers this site and is available to third-party developers is published as socionics-core on npm under the MIT licence. See the Open Source page for details.
Fonts and icons
System font stack — no web fonts loaded. Icons are inline SVG or Unicode where used.
Why this stack
The primary criterion was longevity. A static site with no server costs, deployed from a free GitHub repository to a free Netlify account, has no ongoing financial dependency beyond domain renewal. Previous Socionics resources have disappeared when hosting bills went unpaid; this architecture removes that failure mode entirely. See About This Site for more on this.