Arash Rezvani — bilingual publishing site for a writer and teacher

01Context

A career that resists a single headline

Arash Rezvani is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer and adventurer. By his own account he has published close to ten books and more than a hundred poems, coached cycling for fifteen years, climbed for more than twenty-five and photographed for more than thirty. The brief was a personal site and a journal for all of it.

Persian is his language and his readers’, so Persian is the site’s default, with English beside it. Around his own account I built a publishing site: a page for each part of his work, a shelf of books with a page each, a journal, his songs, search, and a calendar for booking a call. It is edited from a Persian admin and hosted inside Iran.

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the English experience page, headed “More than a title”, inside two ruled walls — Figure 02One page, two URLs: each language is its own document, not a translation switched by a cookie.

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the same experience page in Persian, set right to left with no letter-spacing — Figure 02One page, two URLs: each language is its own document, not a translation switched by a cookie.

02Problem

Truth, structure and reach

The first problem was truth. A life this varied invites rounding up, and the project had already met the worse case: the first content the design was built on described someone else, and his own written account contradicted nearly every fact in it.

The second was structure. His practices have run side by side for decades — writing, teaching riders and instructors, coaching cycling, photography, calligraphy, the mountain, the road, guiding, relief work — and none replaced another. One profile page cannot hold that, and pages that each try to sum it all up end up repeating one another.

The third was reach. For a writer whose books and readers are Persian, the Persian pages have to be findable at their own addresses. A site that renders Persian well but serves it to no crawler has failed at the one thing it is for.

03Constraints

One small server, on a filtered network

The site runs on one server in Iran with two cores and under 4 GB of memory, which also runs its Git server and its mail. From there Docker Hub, Google’s container registry and Quay all answer 403, and YouTube is filtered, so the server cannot reach the videos its own music page lists.

Builds run on the same machine and take both cores for about eight minutes; measured on 2 September, response times went from 5 seconds to 37 and then to a timeout until the build finished. No CI runner was ever installed, so nothing checks a push before it goes live. Each of these shaped a decision further down.

04My role

One designer-developer, one author

I designed and built the site alone, from Arash’s own written account and the messages he sent about each practice. The code started from Payload’s website template, and I built it with AI assistance: Claude is credited on 93 of the 97 commits.

Owned

The information architecture: which page holds which part of his account
The brand and the written design language
The content model: 8 collections, 4 globals and 21 page blocks, 16 of them written for this site
The Payload and Next.js build, in two languages
The booking system and its calendar
The in-country stack, the deploy log and the content-operations log
Art direction of the imagery: 37 generated images, the likeness drawn from his photographs

Co-owned

Collaborated

Arash: his biography, his ten practice statements, his book covers and his photographs

Every figure on the site traces back to his own words; where the site and a draft disagree, the biography wins. Drafts, live preview, scheduling, search indexing and the form builder came with the template; the structure, the rules and the decisions are mine.

05Sources

Nothing inferred, nothing filled in

The site may use two sources for who he is: a document he wrote about himself, and ten messages he sent on 11 September, one per practice. The biography file keeps both, with Persian as the authoritative text, and a table of sourced numbers, each as he stated it, its ≈ or + intact. When an older content file disagreed with his account, the conflict was written into the biography and his account won.

The same file lists what does not exist yet — the rest of his book titles, the text of any poem, his certificates — and the rule for all of it is to render nothing. So the gaps show as plain statements, not placeholders: the books page lists six of close to ten titles and says so, the poetry page explains four forms and says no poem is here yet, and the work page says the calligraphy and photographs are not online.

A placement table in the same file records the page and block where each of his passages now lives, so a later edit cannot quietly put a passage in two places.

The site went public on 30 August; its content became truthful on 3 September, when his account replaced the older file on every page.

“Nothing here is inferred, and no number outside this table may appear on the site.”
— The biography’s sourced-numbers table · Built from Arash’s own account and ten messages he sent, one per practice

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the Persian books page, whose opening says six of close to ten titles are listed and the rest are not yet — Figure 03The books page states its own limits: close to ten titles written, translated and published, six of them listed, the rest not yet.

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the Persian poetry page’s poems section, which says no poem text is here yet

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the English work page’s closing band: the work is not online yet

06Structure

One page per job, one home per fact

I gave each page one job. Experience is the overview: nine threads, each linking to the page that carries it in full, and the only band of figures on the site. Teach, Road, Looking and Poetry each hold one part of his account, in his words. Books, the journal and music are collections with an index. Search and Contact serve every page.

What holds it together is the design language’s axiom applied to content: a page says a thing once, and a fact has one home. On the first page audited, Work, the same six things appeared three times — the figures in the hero and again in the stats band, one line as a pull quote and again in a list. Each fact got one owner and the copies were deleted; nothing was rewritten. Across the rollout the audit found fourteen repetitions on five pages, and every fix was a subtraction.

Cross-links replace repetition. Teach and Road each show the book from their own subject, linked to its page, and Teach, Books, Music and Experience close on a band that leads to Contact. Once the inner pages owned their facts, the home page had nothing of its own left to say, so it became the index: the books, six ways in, the country map, the newest songs and the latest notes.

Two older pages have not caught up. Work and Experience predate Road and Looking, and six of Experience’s nine links still point at Work, which now holds only a short list and a ‘not online yet’ band.

Diagram of the site’s routes, numbered one to eight: the home page, about and experience, the four practice pages, their links to books, books and the journal, music, search and contact, and the older work page

The home page’s “Four decades, one country” section: a short text and a link beside a line map of Iran.

The home page’s notes section: six numbered, type-only cards, each with a date, a topic tag and a title.

07Approach

One axiom, and every page measured against it

The site first went live on an editorial brand system with a palette drawn from Arash’s own photography: a warm ink, amber, paper, a cool mist and cobalt. Every pair was measured. Amber on paper came out at 2.1:1, so amber is never text on white, and one amber per view became a rule.

Three days later the design language was written down as one sentence, “No line without an end”, with three legal ways for a line to stop: on a wall, on another line, or on a change of ground. Anything else is a defect, not a style, and every page was rebuilt and measured against it.

The rule settled details that usually get argued. The walls sit on the content column’s edge, so every rule a block draws lands on them without the block knowing they exist. A band with its own colour draws no rule, because the colour change is the edge. Every line has one weight, 1.5 px, and no region has a rounded corner. A form field is an underline that shows focus by changing colour, measured at 6.18:1 in the light theme and 7.44:1 in the dark, where 3:1 is required. And Persian is never letter-spaced: every tracking value, Tailwind’s own included, is zeroed for Persian, which had been closing the joins of every Persian headline.

The test for an edge is not whether a boundary exists but whether a reader would see the line stop there. The home portrait failed it by 64 px, so its column now draws a rule of its own.

From a template to a live, bilingual site

01
Build-outPayload’s website template inside Next.js, a Persian admin and a deploy pipeline, from 25 August
02
Brand systemA palette measured from his photography; live on 30 August

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the practices list with its row and column rules, closed by an ink band of sourced figures

08Imagery

A likeness drawn from his own photographs

The site launched with an empty media library. His archive held 59 images, and none gave a clean reference: in the first 42 I checked, every close frame had his head under a cap, hat or helmet, usually with sunglasses, and every bare-headed frame showed his face too small to read. So I directed the imagery with an image model, working from those photographs.

The first site images came from two early reference sheets. A week later I built nine wardrobe turnarounds, one for each recurring way he dresses in his photos, each traced to named source photographs and seen from nine fixed angles, and they became the continuity reference for seventeen editorial studies. Every image was briefed on the brand’s rules — its palette, square corners, one amber at most, and no text, logo or invented book title. The eleven site images keep to them; a few of the studies go past the one-amber limit.

Where a real photograph works, it wins: his About portrait and avatar are crops of a photograph of him. Here the generated images are shown as generated; on his own site they carry no label yet, and that is an open item.

The English home page’s first screen: the headline “Life in its different forms” beside the three-window masthead portrait.

The Persian home page’s first screen, mirrored right to left: the headline beside the three-window masthead portrait.

The home page’s “Six ways” section: six numbered practices, each under one of the generated section images. — Figure 09“Six ways”, the home page’s index of his practices: each practice sits under one of the generated section cards.

The Persian home page on a phone: the headline and the opening line.

The Persian home page on a phone, scrolled to the three-window masthead portrait.

Rectilinear portrait collage of Arash Rezvani in a dark cap, layered with abstract mountain and road photographs on a textured paper ground.

Nine-panel editorial portrait mosaic of Arash Rezvani in clear round glasses, a muted lavender-gray blazer, and a black shirt under hard window light.

Four-part editorial study of Arash Rezvani in a navy blazer and white shirt, shown from overhead, close, seated, and rear views.

09Publishing

Records, and everywhere each one reaches

Books, journal posts and songs are records, not sections of a page, because a record can have its own address, its own metadata and a place in search. Publishing a record does not make it reachable, so each kind is wired to the surfaces a reader or a crawler arrives from.

A book gets a page in each language, a row in the books sitemap and in search, Book structured data that names his role as the cover prints it, and a share image cut from its jacket. A journal post gets a page per language, the posts sitemap, an RSS feed per language, Article structured data and a filter by category; the six categories carry the names of his practices. A song has no page of its own: the music page and the home band read the videos collection, and describe it as a list of VideoObjects.

Around them: canonical URLs, hreflang pairs with x-default on Persian, three sitemaps, a WebSite and Person graph on every page, and share cards: a book uses its own jacket, every other page the site’s card.

The journal does not meet the site’s own rule yet. Twenty of its 21 entries were created in one batch on 10 September, written in his voice, credited to me and dated as far back as January; the other is left from the older content. Until his own writing replaces them, the system works and its content does not.

Diagram of one book record and the six places it reaches: its Persian and English pages, the shelf and the teach page, the books sitemap and search, Book structured data, and a share image cut from its cover

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the Persian journal, its entries dated in Shamsi and filtered by practice

Arash Rezvani on desktop — the English journal, the same entries dated in the Gregorian calendar and filtered by practice

10Key decisions

Six decisions that held

Each was forced by the audience, the source material or the network, not by taste.

01
Give each language its own URL
The first Persian release chose the language by cookie: one URL, two renders. A crawler carries no cookie, so every translated page was reachable at no URL and no hreflang could be emitted. Now English lives under /en and Persian under /fa, and a bare URL goes to the reader’s last language, or to Persian.
Alternatives
One URL, with the language chosen by cookie
Trade-off
Every internal link must carry its prefix, and the language toggle has to be a full page load.
02
Guard bookings with a database index, not a hook
Two confirmed calls can never share a start time. Payload’s own index options cannot say “unique among confirmed rows only”, so the app builds a partial unique index at boot, and public bookings go through one endpoint. Tested as a race: one 201, one 409, one row.
Alternatives
A duplicate check in a save hook
Trade-off
If the index fails to build, the site runs on without the guarantee, so the boot log has to be read.
Evidence
One day’s free quarter-hours in Tehran time; in English the Shamsi date carries its Gregorian date beneath it.

11Solution

From reading to asking

Search reads one index built from pages, posts and books. Since 13 September it reads that index in the page’s own language, so Persian posts come back under Persian titles. Results stop at twelve, and result pages are kept out of search engines, because every query would otherwise become a thin page.

The contact form is a band of underlined fields with a hidden honeypot. The mail server is wired in, and the container refuses to start without its settings, because the failure it guards against is the quiet one: a form that thanks the visitor and tells nobody. The form itself, though, has no notification set in production, so today messages wait in the admin: the same quiet failure, one layer up.

A call is booked in the steps below. Every rule about when — hours, breaks, slot length, the buffer between calls, notice, blocked days, and a switch that closes it — lives in a setting the admin edits, so changing the hours is never a deployment. Bookings send no email yet; the admin opens on the next confirmed calls.

Search is only half fixed. Books and pages still come back under English titles on the Persian search, and the excerpt and category under each result are stored in one language, so the English search shows Persian excerpts and misses matches in English descriptions.

Arash Rezvani on a phone — Persian search results for the word for “coach”: a book under its English title, then two posts under Persian titles

Arash Rezvani on a phone — English search results for “coach”, each with a Persian excerpt under its English title

Booking a call, in five steps

01
Choose a dayA Shamsi month, Saturday first; past days, Fridays and full days are disabled
02
Choose a timeFree quarter-hours in Tehran time, with the visitor’s own time beside them

Arash Rezvani on a phone — the free quarter-hours of a chosen day in Tehran time, in Persian numerals

Arash Rezvani on a phone — the booking form in Persian: the chosen day and time above fields for name, phone and email

12Operations

Running it without a release

The admin speaks Persian by default and turns right-to-left on its own; the mark on its login screen is his signature, drawn in place of Payload’s. Drafts, autosave, live preview and scheduled publishing came with the template, but until 8 September scheduling did nothing: the admin queued a job that nothing ran, so a scheduled post would never have appeared. A job runner inside the container now drains the queue every minute.

From 3 September content changes are made at runtime, not in code. Between 11 and 18 September the content-operations log records fifteen writes — his practice statements, the booking settings, the home page’s cards, the music page and its songs — and one rollback: the About page’s nine cards, which broke the Persian page in browsers without WebGL, were taken back through the API within the hour and restored the same day once the code was fixed.

Each write follows the same steps, and each row in the log carries its verification.

AI agents can read the content through MCP but cannot write it; widening that would itself be a code change, made on purpose.

One content change, start to finish

01
ClassifyContent, a setting, something to make editable once, or code
02
Back upThe document in both languages, before the write

13Outcomes

Live, with the gaps named

Live at arashrezvani.me since 30 August 2026 and taking bookings since 12 September. Still open, and on the record: no analytics of any kind, so there are no visitor numbers; no CI runner, so a push reaches the site without lint or type checks; no email from the contact form or from bookings, so both wait in the admin; search that is only half localized; journal entries that are not his; and generated images his site does not label.

Repetitions found and removed: 14; The say-it-once audit across five pages; every fix was a subtraction.; Measured outcome · The design language’s rollout audit
Tests passing at the last release gate: 307; Beside type checks, lint, a production build and a smoke test before the push.; Measured outcome · Deployment log, 18 September 2026
Persian and English at their own URLs: Persian by default, both halves in hreflang and in the sitemaps.; Delivered output
A deploy log that keeps its failures: 18 production runs recorded, five of them failed, beside a separate log of every content write and rollback.; Delivered output

What was delivered

Shamsi booking
A URL per language
A page per book

14What I learned

What I’d keep, and what bit

01
State the language as one sentence
“No line without an end” settled arguments without another meeting, because every disagreement reduced to one question: does this line arrive somewhere?
02
A bilingual site is not bilingual until each language has a URL
The cookie scheme passed every test a person could run, and failed completely for the one visitor that matters most to a writer’s site: the crawler.
03
An enhancement that cannot fail closed is not one
A WebGL scroll reveal threw in browsers without WebGL and replaced a whole Persian page with an error. It came back behind a capability check and an error boundary that settles to the plain picture.
04
A rule has to reach whatever is added in bulk
Every page was measured against his account one by one, and the journal was not: its entries went in as one batch. It is the one part of the site that fails the site’s own test, and the first thing to replace.

Language

Arash Rezvani — bilingual publishing site for a writer and teacher

A career that resists a single headline

Truth, structure and reach

One small server, on a filtered network

One designer-developer, one author

Owned

Co-owned

Collaborated

Nothing inferred, nothing filled in

One page per job, one home per fact

One axiom, and every page measured against it

From a template to a live, bilingual site

A likeness drawn from his own photographs

Records, and everywhere each one reaches

Six decisions that held

Give each language its own URL

Guard bookings with a database index, not a hook

From reading to asking

Booking a call, in five steps

Running it without a release

One content change, start to finish

Live, with the gaps named

What was delivered

What I’d keep, and what bit

State the language as one sentence

A bilingual site is not bilingual until each language has a URL

An enhancement that cannot fail closed is not one

A rule has to reach whatever is added in bulk

Load a video only when it is asked for

Keep the whole stack inside Iran

Make each book a record with its own page

Treat content as data, not a release