This was a talk given at the 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good (2024): https://conf.11ty.dev/2024/building-a-town-that-doesnt-exist/

The town of Question Mark, Ohio has a city hall, a newspaper, a library, a chicken joint, an ice cream store, a dump, a haunted factory, two cults, a sordid past, and a mysterious glowing void in the woods.

None of it is real, of course, but all of it exists on the web, thanks to Eleventy, Tailwind CSS, and Alpine.js, the crucial building blocks for creating a year-long immersive novel told not in a book but across the entire internet. This talk looks under the hood at how one person built 40 websites to tell the story of Question Mark, Ohio, a town that disappears into time.