How this site is built
deshant.com is a personal website written in the register of a Wikipedia article: an infobox, a lead, a contents box, sectioned prose in the third person, and numbered references. This note explains the choice and the machinery. It is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation, who would be within their rights to find the whole thing a little cheeky.
Why it looks like Wikipedia
The honest version first. Deshant wanted the site live in days, not months, and knew from experience that "just pick a nice style" is where personal websites go to die. Font pairings, spacing scales, a colour palette that survives dark mode: each is an afternoon, and afternoons are how a weekend project becomes a quarterly one. So he borrowed a layout that a few billion people already know how to read, shipped it, and moved on to the parts that matter, which are the words. A proper style of his own is on the list. The list is long.
It turned out to be a good decision for reasons beyond laziness. A portfolio has one job: let a stranger decide in ninety seconds whether to talk to you. Encyclopedia entries are optimised for exactly that reading pattern. The first sentence says what the subject is, the infobox answers the questions people actually have (where, since when, doing what, how to reach), and the contents box lets a reader jump to the one section they care about.[^1] The tone also keeps the author honest: every claim has to be attributable, so there is nowhere to hide a vague "passionate about scalable solutions".
On the legal question, which he did check: a look is not something anyone owns. Wikipedia's software is open source under the GPL, its wordmark and puzzle-globe logo are trademarks, and neither appears here.[^2] The idea of a serif title with a rule under it, blue links and a grey box on the right is not copyrightable, and every line of CSS on this site was written from scratch. Copy the idea, never the files.
Machinery
- Next.js with the App Router, statically generated, deployed on Vercel.
- Original CSS. Three appearances: light, dark, and a Deshant neumorphic theme lifted from the design tokens of OneTake.
- Hover previews on links to Wikipedia and to other notes, built on Wikipedia's public summary API.
- Notes are Markdown files. Front matter supplies the title, date, summary and tags; headings become the contents box; a trailing References list becomes the numbered footnotes;
[^n]in the text becomes a superscript citation. - Certificate scans are never public files; they sit behind an emailed verification code and expire after an hour.
References
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section (Wikipedia)
- Wikimedia Foundation trademark policy (Wikimedia Foundation)