A homepage that shows its own philosophy

The smeldr.dev homepage now opens with 110,000 GPU-rendered embers: ember dust that drifts, self-organises into a constellation network, and gets swept by a single hard-edged scan before the loop begins again. No bundler, no npm, no Three.js. One vanilla WebGL2 file. Here is why the visual exists, and why the constraint was the right one.

Release Date 23 June 2026
webgldesignopen-source

What you see first

The old homepage told you what Smeldr is. The new one shows it.

Open smeldr.dev and you will see 110,000 embers drift in the dark. They are not decorative. They are the product, animated: a single ember falls, a flash of heat scatters everything, and then structure begins to emerge. Nodes brighten. Connections form. A constellation network builds itself out of what looked like chaos.

Then a beam crosses the scene from bottom to top, precise and mechanical. The network flares along the scan line and settles back. The loop starts again.

What it means

The sequence maps to what Smeldr actually does:

  • Chaos: raw content, unstructured, before any schema
  • Emergence: structure begins to surface
  • Network: typed nodes, relationships, a constellation of published content
  • Scan: the system reading and verifying its own state
  • Reset: the lifecycle continues

Most visitors will not consciously read the metaphor. They will feel that something is being forged. That is the point.

Iron and Ember palette throughout. No blue-cold sci-fi. Warm amber and orange: the colours of something being made.

The constraint that became a feature

Smeldr has no build pipeline. go build is the pipeline. No webpack, no PostCSS, no bundler. This is a deliberate principle: dependencies you do not have cannot break.

The animation follows the same rule. The result is a single file, hero-animation.js, 496 lines of vanilla WebGL2, that drops into /static/js/ and runs. It compiles its own GLSL shaders at startup, builds the particle buffer in JavaScript, and drives the entire 20-second loop without touching the network again after the initial page load.

A dependency on nothing.

110,000 particles on a modern GPU. 14,000 for visitors with prefers-reduced-motion enabled. Device pixel ratio capped at 1.75 so mobile GPUs stay useful.

The canvas sits position: fixed behind the page. Hero content floats above it as a normal HTML layer. Scroll and the canvas fades out. The nav switches from transparent to steel the moment you start scrolling. No framework. A scroll listener and two CSS classes.

Go see it

smeldr.dev. Watch for the moment the embers settle into a constellation and the scan beam crosses them.