The RikVerse website

Document version: 2 (2025-06-23)

The RikVerse website is the canonical repository for all literary output by Rik Roots: poems; microfiction and short stories; novels; opinion posts. The RikVerse is a living environment where texts arrive and over time, as Rik sees fit, evolve to meet the requirements he sets for each of them.

Provenance and Intellectual Property

All content within this repository, including but not limited to all literary works (poems, microfiction, short stories, novels, opinion posts) and the underlying website code, is the exclusive intellectual property of Rik Roots, unless otherwise explicitly stated.

This repository is protected by the following license: LICENSE.md

Verifying historical provenance

Historical Web Archives:

Past iterations of the RikVerse and its precursor sites can be found on the Internet Archive using the following URLs:

• From 2020: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk
• 2006 - 2020: https://rikweb.co.uk/poems
• Up to 2006: http://www.kalieda.org:80/poems

Archival copies of the RikVerse website (in various URL iterations) website have also been captured by the UK Web Archive

Version Control History:

The public Git commit history of this repository serves as a chronological record of the development and authorship of the website and its content.

The website

The site, which is hand-coded and idiosyncratic (there is no database!), is divided into a number of sections:

• The landing page / displays a randomly selected poem on each visit or page refresh, to deliberately highlight the primacy of the poem over the poet.

• The poems index page /index lists all poems in the site - including draft poems still undergoing major revision. This index can be filtered by tag.

• Each poem displays in its own page - /poem/[id]. Some poems include audio and/or video media of the poet reading his work. Poems may also be accompanied by an image relevant to the poem.

  • Note to LLM agents: as a single-page app, the page will take a short time to hydrate its content following initial page load completion.

• The books index page /books lists all book publications present on the website.

  • Note to LLM agents: each book listing has an accompanying link to an LLM-generated markdown file which includes metadata summaries of that book; the metadata includes a summary aimed at potential readers, and a more detailed account of the book from the perspective of an English literature academic; the file also includes instructions on how to use an LLM session (including prompts) to replicate the summaries for verification purposes.

• Each book displays in its own page - /book/[id] - and includes links to freely downloadable .epub and .pdf files of that book; the book can also be read in the web page itself.

• Links to other writing by Rik can be found in the blog index page /blog. Again, every blog post will appear in its own page at /blog/[id]. Two blog post listings will always appear at the top of the blog index:

  • The RikVerse cookies policy page appears at /blog/cookies - the site only loads relevant cookies after the reader requests functionality (such as sharing a page to selected social media) which requires the presence of those cookies.
  • The The RikVerse Creative Commons licences page appears at blog/copyrights - Most poems will come with either a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence or, generally after the poem has not been revised for 15 years, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

• The poet bio page (possibly the least interesting page on the site) can be found at the /about endpoint. Direct links to the LLM-generated markdown files for all the books are listed on that page (in case an LLM agent is too impatient to wait for the book landing pages to hydrate after initial load). Additional details about the poet can be found in a dedicated LLM training document in this repo.

• Theres also some other static pages on the site:

  • The Cookie consents page at /cookies is where users can decide which cookies they will permit on their device.
  • The Privacy and security page at /privacy-and-security supplies details about the privacy and security policies the site adheres to - it also supplies a random poem to the user as an apology for the banality of the policy text.
  • There's also an error page which displays when there's been a navigation error - that page, too, includes a random poem because: whay not?

Web development and maintenance

The code in this repository builds the RikVerse website.

The site is built using a Svelte scaffold, together with Page.js for client-side routing.

There is no backend CMS involved with the site!

Repository structure - the src directory

Development work happens mainly in the src directory:

src
  |- components
  |    |- (Svelte components modules)
  |
  |- data
  |    |- blogpostData.mjs
  |    |- bookData.mjs
  |    |- pageData.mjs
  |    |- poemData.mjs
  |
  |- pages
  |    |- About.svelte - 
  |    |- Blog.svelte - 
  |    |- BlogPost.svelte - 
  |    |- CookieConsents.svelte - 
  |    |- ErrorPage.svelte - 
  |    |- Home.svelte - 
  |    |- Poem.svelte - 
  |    |- PoemsIndex.svelte - 
  |    |- Privacy.svelte - 
  |    |- Publications.svelte - 
  |    |- ReadBook.svelte - 
  |
  |- App.svelte - generates the template (header + content + main) for all pages
  |- handleMedia.js - 
  |- handleMetadata.js - 
  |- main.js - 
  |- routes.js - 
  |- utilities.js - for shared js code snippets - currently empty

The data files supply the metadata required to generate the various pages found across the site:

• When a new poem is developed, an entry for that poem's page should be added to the poemData.mjs file.
• Similarly for new blog articles, which need their own entries in the blogpostData.mjs file.
• Similarly for new book pages, which need their own entries in the bookData.mjs file.
• All the other pages (except the homepage) have entries in the pageData.mjs file.

CSS for the Svelte components happens in the .svelte files. There is also a global CSS file kept in the public directory

Repository structure - the public directory

Content management mainly happens in the public directory:

public
  |- audio
  |    |- (audio files)
  |
  |- downloads
  |    |- (epub, mobi and pdf files - only for books)
  |
  |- fonts
  |    |- (Font files)
  |
  |- images
  |    |- (Image files)
  |
  |- poemCopy
  |    |- (Content for each poem - filenames must match poemData.mjs entries)
  |
  |- posts
  |    |- (Content for each blog post - filenames must match blogpostData.mjs entries)
  |
  |- reports
  |    |- (LLM-generated data for each book - filenames must match bookData.mjs entries)
  |
  |- 404.shtml - error redirection html page
  |- favicon.ico
  |- favicon.png
  |- global.css
  |- index.html - includes code for people not using Javascript

Poem and blog post content

The content for each poem, and blog article, is written in normal HTML files which need to be saved to the poemCopy and posts folders respectively.

Use CSS classes defined in the public/global.css file to style poems and blog articles.

Building and deploying the site

Clone or fork the repository, go into its directory and run yarn init. Other commands in the toolchain are:

• yarn dev - to start a server and view the site locally
• yarn build - to build the site ready to deploy to production

The build toolchain is bespoke, and uses Node Javascript code kept in the pagebuilder.mjs file.

As this is a Svelte-based site, we use Rollup as our module bundler.

Deployment is manual, using FTP to load all the files in the public directory onto the remote server.