How This Site Is Built

This site doesn't track you. It doesn't know you were here. It won't follow you around the internet with ads for sake you already found on your own. You can read everything on it without giving anything up.

That's on purpose.

No GDPR Banner, No Third-Party Tracking

This site does not track you the way most of the web does. There are no third-party analytics scripts, no advertising pixels, no cookies dropped on your machine to follow you around the internet. We will never know what ads you saw before you got here, and we have no interest in feeding that data back into the machine.

There are also no affiliate links on this site. No sponsored content. No paid placements. Just things we actually think are worth your time.

Mockingbird Sake serves everything from its own hosting environment, rather than pulling resources from third-party servers. Fonts, images, scripts, all of it lives here. We use Bunny Fonts instead of Google Fonts specifically because Bunny does not log or collect visitor data. No third-party requests, no invisible handshakes happening in the background while you read about koji.

We do use Cloudflare for security and performance, and we may use privacy-respecting self-hosted analytics down the road, tools like Umami or similar, that give us a basic sense of what content is useful without collecting personal data or reporting anything to third parties. If and when we do, we will update this page to say so clearly.

You have also probably noticed there is no cookie consent banner here. Those banners exist because websites are collecting data and are legally required to tell you. We are not doing that, so there is no banner. Just the page.

We are trying to make this a safe space. Come read about sake without giving anything up.

Built to Last

Mockingbird Sake is built on Astro, a modern static site framework, with Sanity as the content management system behind it. We have kept the architecture as simple as we reasonably can, which turns out to be good for more than just performance. Fewer moving parts means fewer places for things to break, fewer dependencies on third-party services that could change their terms or disappear tomorrow, and fewer security vulnerabilities for bad actors to exploit.

A simpler site is a safer site. We do not have a lot of inputs, meaning places where someone from the outside could type something into our site, and that is a deliberate choice. It does make some things harder. To contact us, you'll have to open your own email provider and write to [email protected]. Site-wide search is not available here because opening that kind of text input introduces security considerations we would rather avoid.

If you find that limiting, there is a quick workaround worth knowing. In any search engine, type "site:mockingbirdsake.com" followed by whatever term you are looking for. Every page on this site that mentions that term will show up in the results. Old-fashioned, reliable, and no login required.

Accessible By Design

We also think a fast, easy-to-navigate site is itself an accessibility feature. We have kept Mockingbird Sake as lean and streamlined as we reasonably can, so pages load quickly, even on a slow connection or an older device. Nobody should have to wait around, or burn through their data plan, just to read about sake.

We check every page on this site against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines most of the web is measured against, looking at things like color contrast, heading structure, and keyboard navigation, and we fix what we find. This is not a certification or a guarantee of full compliance, just our genuine, ongoing effort to get it right. If you ever run into something on this site that does not work well with a screen reader, keyboard, or other assistive technology, let us know at [email protected].

We also use structured markup throughout the site, meaning proper HTML headings, landmarks, and schema.org data behind the scenes, along with descriptive alt text on every image, so that screen readers, search engines, and anyone else parsing the page can understand what they are looking at, not just see it.

Supports Indie Web

We grew up watching the internet grow up, and it was one of the most remarkable things we have ever witnessed.

Before broadband, before social media, before digital marketing dollars influenced what you should care about, there were bulletin board systems. BBSes. A computer anyone could set up and allow you to dial into over a phone line — usually local, because long distance was a real money suck. Suddenly you were connected to a handful of real people in your community, logged in, chatting, playing games, and exploring whatever had been shared in that little hub.

Then search engines arrived and the World Wide Web exploded. Everybody was making a cool, niche website and every webpage could be found. It was a bit of a golden age, before the widespread monetization that the web has since become. Taking a digital look around, it doesn't seem like a lot of people are making websites for fun nowadays.

Mockingbird Sake is a hobby site, made to share a passion, crafted with care by the delights of the maker (who you can find at 80UMa.com). You will also find us recommending links to other sites with sake-obsessed people at the helm, those with less of a dollar sign focus and more of a drive to share their passion. There are no affiliate links here. If we point you somewhere, it is because we think it is worth the trip.

And if you like this type of indie website or share the same type of independent vision, check out indieweb.org. It's a community for independent and personal web creators that share a people-focused vision for websites.