If you stare at the modern web long enough, you start to feel a little tired. It’s loud. It’s anxious. It’s desperate for your attention.
Most software directories feel like a bazaar where everyone is shouting. You search for a simple VPN or a secure note-taking app, and you’re immediately hit with “Top 10” lists (that are actually just ads), pop-ups begging for your email, and affiliate links disguised as advice.
I wasn’t trying to fix the whole internet. I just wanted to build a sanctuary from it.
I wanted a library, not a marketplace. A place that felt like stepping into a quiet, temperature-controlled server room rather than a crowded mall.
So, as a personal experiment, I built NoLogs.in.
It is a curated directory of privacy tools, yes. But for me, it was really a learning project—a challenge to see if I could build a “dumb,” simple, static site that was actually useful.
Here is the blueprint behind the build, and what I learned along the way.
The Motivation: Scratching My Own Itch
When I started this, I didn’t have a grand philosophy in mind. I just had a friction point.
I consider myself “privacy-aware.” I know I should de-Google my life. But even I freeze up when I see fifty different Linux distros or twelve different encrypted email providers. The sheer volume of choice is paralyzing.
I realized that what I wanted wasn’t a debate; I wanted a map.
I built NoLogs for the “Overwhelmed Privacy-Aware” (which is mostly just me). I wanted to organize my own digital life and share the notes. I stopped trying to optimize for “clicks” and started optimizing for “calm.”
The Tech Stack: Falling in Love with “Boring”
As a developer, we often get distracted by the shiny new toys—complex frameworks, dynamic databases, AI integrations.
For this project, I went the other way. I wanted to see how much I could strip away. I wanted to master the “Static” approach.
1. The Engine: Hugo
I decided to learn Hugo. Unlike a standard dynamic site (like WordPress) that cooks the meal every time a guest orders it by building the page on the server, Hugo cooks everything in advance.
It builds the entire site once, locally. When you visit NoLogs.in, you aren’t waiting for a server to “think” or query a database. You are just downloading a simple HTML file. It’s instant. It’s lightweight.
It was a reminder that sometimes, the “boring” way is actually the elegant way.
2. The Structure: Leaf Bundles
Organizing the data was a fun engineering puzzle. I didn’t want a messy spreadsheet or a fragile database.
I utilized Hugo’s “Leaf Bundle” structure. It’s a way of organizing content where every tool—whether it’s ProtonVPN or Signal—lives in its own self-contained folder. The text (index.md), the logo, and the metadata all sit together in one little package.
- If I want to add a tool? I copy a folder.
- If I want to delete a tool? I delete the folder.
It felt less like database management and more like modular engineering. It keeps my repository spotless and ensures that assets never get lost.
3. Hosting: Cloudflare Pages
Since the site is just a collection of files, I didn’t need a traditional server. I hosted it on Cloudflare Pages.
I chose this to get hands-on experience with edge networks. By pushing the site to the edge, it loads instantly from a location close to you, wherever you are. Plus, it puts an enterprise-grade security layer in front of my little hobby project by default. Fast, global, and rock solid.
The Design: Digital Brutalism
I looked at this project as a UI experiment. I wanted to move away from the standard “blog” layout and create something that felt raw and functional—like a tool you’d find on an old-school command line.
I used the Terminal theme for Hugo, which leans heavily into a retro, monospaced aesthetic.
- The Vibe: It uses a high-contrast, monospaced font that mimics the feeling of typing into a console. It tells the user immediately: This is a utility, not a magazine.
- No Distractions: There are no hero images, no parallax scrolling, and no animations. Just text and code.
- The Customization: I tweaked the CSS to create a simple grid layout. It forces the content to stand on its own. You can scan the list and find what you need without wading through paragraphs of fluff.
Design is communication. By choosing a terminal aesthetic, I’m signaling that the value here is in the data, not the decoration.
The Editorial Model: Why I Didn’t Use AI
In the age of AI, the temptation was to write a script that scrapes the web, summarizes 500 tools, and publishes them automatically. I could have finished the site in an afternoon.
But that felt like cheating.
I stuck to a manual Editorial Curation Model.
- I decide what is listed.
- I write the descriptions.
- I check the links.
If a tool has a murky privacy policy, I don’t list it. If a tool sells out to an ad-tech company, I delete the folder.
This human bottleneck is a feature, not a bug. It means that when you see something on the site, a human being (me) has actually looked at it and said, “Yes, this is valid.” In a world of generated sludge, hand-curation feels like the ultimate premium product.
Why This Matters
You might ask, “Why go to all this trouble for a simple directory?”
Because building simple things is the best way to sharpen your fundamentals.
Building NoLogs was a chance to practice “calm” coding. It was a project where I could build a useful, beautiful thing that respects the user, without any corporate metrics hanging over my head.
We can treat our digital lives as something to be designed, not just endured.
I invite you to take a look. There are no cookies to accept. There is no newsletter pop-up to close. It’s just a quiet place where you might find a tool to reclaim a little bit of your own digital freedom.
And really, isn’t that what we’re all looking for?