de-google.us

Live: https://de-google.us · (also answers at degoog.us and www, both canonicalized to the apex) · Class A — open source, MIT (§10)

A warm, plain-English guide to limiting Big Tech without blowing up your life — written first-person by someone who runs an IT company, is a Microsoft Partner, and admits he couldn't fully leave Google or Apple either. Long-form editorial reading, not a product funnel. The through-line: the enemy was never Big Tech, it's default — turn every default into a decision.

Features

• Eight-page guided reading path (home → why → start here → guides), driven by an Astro content collection — new guides are one markdown file away
• In-browser search (Pagefind) — queries never leave the visitor's device
• Self-hosted everything: fonts (Latin-subset woff2), search index, analytics. Zero requests to Google — this site eats its own dog food
• Light and dark themes, defaulting to system preference with a header toggle
• Full SEO kit: canonical URLs, sitemap, Open Graph/Twitter cards, JSON-LD, strict security headers

Stack

Astro 5 (static) · Tailwind 4 · Pagefind · Cloudflare Pages (build pnpm build, output dist) · self-hosted Plausible analytics.

Develop & deploy

pnpm install
pnpm dev        # local dev (search inert — Pagefind indexes at build time)
pnpm build      # astro build && pagefind --site dist
pnpm preview    # serve dist locally

Deploys: merge to main → Cloudflare Pages auto-builds. Feature work goes through a branch + PR, never straight to main.

How it works

Content lives in src/content/pages/*.md with a typed frontmatter schema (src/content/config.ts). A catch-all route renders each page; tier-1/tier-2 entries automatically join the Guides nav and reading order. trailingSlash: 'always' plus a small rehype plugin keeps every internal link canonical (no redirect hops). A custom 404 page keeps unknown routes from soft-404ing.

Privacy

No cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party trackers, no Google anything. Page views are counted by a self-hosted Plausible instance (plausible.thompsonblack.us) — cookieless, no IPs stored, disclosed plainly in /privacy. Search runs entirely in the visitor's browser.

Built to the TGWAB Dev Standards v2.10.1 (internal).

Deviations

• §1 — JetBrains Mono display face — Cinzel stands in for the brand's classical inscriptional serif (license-clean Trajan family); swap via --font-display in src/styles/global.css — 2026-07-30 — permanent
• §15 — audit gate at --audit-level=high — two astro advisories (GHSA-8hv8-536x-4wqp, GHSA-2pvr-wf23-7pc7) are patched only in Astro 6; ignored via pnpm.auditConfig pending the Astro 6 migration — 2026-07-30 — review 2026-09-01
• §1 — "bold and bright" palette — warm paper register is the deliberate anti-manifesto choice for long-form reading; brand red #c5282f remains the through-line — 2026-07-30 — permanent

Everything else follows the sheet: exact ❤️ footer credit (build-time year), Octocat header + footer, and CI (§15) — type-check, build, no-eval and mailto gates, and a headless-Chromium Playwright harness serving dist/ under the real _headers CSP on every PR (scripts/serve-with-csp.mjs, tests/).

Credits

Component	Version	License
Astro	5.x	MIT
Tailwind CSS	4.x	MIT
Pagefind	1.x	MIT
@astrojs/sitemap	3.x	MIT
Cinzel (via @fontsource)	5.x	SIL OFL 1.1
Inter (via @fontsource)	5.x	SIL OFL 1.1
Plausible Analytics (self-hosted)	—	AGPL-3.0

License

MIT © 2026 Michal Ferber (ThompsonBlack LLC d.b.a. TechGuyWithABeard)